Loquat
2mo ago
His oldest daughter is at an age where she constantly demands and monopolizes attention, such that any gathering which includes her inevitably requires at least one person to be fully attentive to entertaining and indulging her, lest she become a terror.
Let me guess, there aren't any other kids near her age in the family? I can tell you, my own four-year-old demands attention like that when she's the only kid present, but when there are other young children around for her to play with she'll happily run around with them and only occasionally require attention from the adults. (Yet another reason why parents socialize with their kids' friends parents - you actually get to socialize.)
Loquat
2mo ago
hateful and/or violent intent
It strikes me that these are two entirely different things here. I have read, in newspapers and magazines, respectable journalists express complete and utter disdain for certain public figures they disliked, including turns of phrase just as bad as your cockroach example, without fear that said public figures would have them arrested. And it wasn't just Trump, this was in the pre-2016 era.
But violent intent, the idea that you yourself wish to commit actual interpersonal harm to B, that's another matter. Are you, in fact, hoping to make this person believe that you're going to come over and beat the shit out of them, but in a way that's plausibly deniable enough that they won't be able to take any legal action against you?
Loquat
3mo ago
Oh neat, we just went to Pittsburgh recently and happened to stay at an AirBnB on the Slopes. Driving was indeed as terrible as you say, though luckily most of the places we wanted to see were reachable via walking/transit. And speaking of transit, is it normal for Pittsburgh transit to be oddly lax about fare enforcement? More than once, incline attendants told us to just pay $5 for our family, even though prominent signs indicated that we should be paying more like $7 for 2 adults plus an older child. A subway employee also told us to just buy 2 adult tickets and not bother buying the half-price child ticket. Were they just going easy on out-of-towners or do they do that all the time or what?
Loquat
3mo ago
A lot of people in this country are generally in favor of (some) abortion being legal but are really uncomfortable with the reality of killing a fetus. Blunt language drives some of those people away, while euphemisms help keep them comfortable voting D.
Loquat
3mo ago
Nothing prevents him from selling it to a rich friend who shared his ideology... except that the friend would have to have enough money available to buy it, and in cash so he can pay the tax. Plus every super-rich friend is likely to run into this same tax problem at the same time, if this new law goes into effect.
Loquat
3mo ago
The part about these "cuttlefish" is foreign to me - can you explain why they are called that, and what they do that's contributing to relationship instability?
Loquat
3mo ago
Logically they'd have to do something like the Obama-era first time homebuyer tax credit, where if you sold the house in less than 3 years (or converted it to a business property, etc) you had to pay the money back.
Loquat
3mo ago
I know people who live in 100-year-old rowhouses, in a city of sufficient age to have substantial numbers of them. The neighborhood's inconvenient if you have a car, since it wasn't designed to accommodate parking, but the houses themselves are perfectly liveable.
Loquat
3mo ago
I've been to China, too; I got pickpocketed once, but aside from that it was great.
An example: one time I was hanging out in a place with a lot of foreign students, when a Chinese lady came through asking if any native English speakers wanted to earn some money recording English-language instructional tapes. I got into her car, and she did indeed drive me to a recording studio where I read out a bunch of grade-school level stuff and then they paid me.
Loquat
3mo ago
"Isn't too bad" by Baltimore standards, I guess - we took the kids to Baltimore to see the aquarium not that long ago, which I see is inside the L, and we still got hassled by a homeless guy for money, literally inside the crowded fast-food place where we were eating lunch. I guess he figured the staff would be too busy with the lunch rush to notice him and throw him out, and a place so close to the aquarium would have plenty of affluent tourists.
Loquat
3mo ago
Related anecdote:
My husband's employer provides various services to other companies, with different departments providing different types of services. They recently had a situation in which $Big_Client had contracts with multiple departments: dept. A's contract was making a ton of money, while dept. B's had over time become unprofitable in ways they were unable to remedy. The guys in A thought it was in the company's overall interest for B's contract to keep going, because A's profit was far larger than B's loss and they thought B continuing to provide their service helped keep $Big_Client well-disposed towards the company overall.
Top management, however, saw only that dept. B was not as profitable as they would have liked, and so that contract has recently been terminated. Only time will tell if this winds up harming dept. A's profits from that client.
Loquat
3mo ago
I wanted to chime in but realized that even though my kids are still under 10 my memories of their infancy are super vague. Must be the sleep deprivation, lol. Anyway, I'm pretty sure both learned quickly and without too much trouble. The only problem I recall is that the first one had a tendency at first to get a nipple at just slightly the wrong angle, so she'd get milk but would give me a blister in the process. But once I figured out how to correct that I think it went smoothly.
Loquat
3mo ago
The one from Serious Eats seems good: https://www.seriouseats.com/homemade-spicy-chili-crisp
This one from the Mala Market also goes into quite a bit of detail, plus they sell ingredients for it: https://blog.themalamarket.com/aromatic-sichuan-chili-oil-xiangla-hongyou/
Loquat
3mo ago
We put up a deer fence, which purported to also keep out smaller critters by having narrower mesh at the bottom, but after it was up we learned that it wasn't actually narrow enough to keep out young rabbits, so we attached a layer of chicken wire around the perimeter. Squirrels and birds still get in, though; there's no keeping them out.
On the gardening subreddits people also recommend wire wastebaskets from the dollar store, turned upside down, to protect smaller plants. It's a decent solution for those who don't want to deal with actual fencing.
Loquat
3mo ago
Have you read Cannibalism with Chinese Characteristics ?
Loquat
3mo ago
If undercover cops started hanging around outside your house, following you to work, etc, but never arrested or otherwise interfered with you, would that be fine? Nobody else in your town should have a problem with that, when it comes to light?
And if you happen to be a well-known and outspoken critic of your town's mayor, and you find out that other critics of the mayor are being followed by undercover police too, everything's still fine and nobody else should be upset?
Loquat
3mo ago
I just read that story, too; since mods are asking for context, let me help out with that.
"Quiet skies" is a TSA program that's basically the kinder, gentler version of the Bush-era no-fly list. Instead of outright stopping suspected terrorists from getting on airplanes, now they send plainclothes air marshals to ride along and keep an eye on things, possibly with the aid of bomb-sniffing dogs, keeping all of this hidden from the suspect and other passengers. Here is a post from the official TSA blog from 2018 explaining it, and comparing it to the practice of having police officers hang around crime hotspots to cool things down: https://www.tsa.gov/blog/2018/08/22/facts-about-quiet-skies
Recently, some employees of this program have come forward with claims that Trump supporters, including but not limited to Tulsi Gabbard, were put on this list and monitored whenever they flew, for political reasons. This has not yet been reported in any mainstream publication as far as I can tell; all the Google results I got were from small-time independent sources and Twitter posts. It's also unclear exactly what criteria were used - it seems the list also included individuals who went to Washington on Jan 6 but were never charged with any crime.
Loquat
3mo ago
some botched case from a decade ago.
More than botched, Ellen Rae Greenberg's death is just a hair less egregious than "suicide by two bullets to the back of the head". When a woman dies with 20 stab wounds, several of which were to the back of her neck and head, and it's ruled a suicide, and the state continues to this day to fight her parents' attempts to get it reclassified and investigated as a homicide, people do tend to raise an eyebrow.
Loquat
3mo ago
I can easily imagine a marketing guy suggesting it deliberately, to make hip young customers feel like buying this candy is mildly naughty and transgressive.
Loquat
3mo ago
I do find the crows mildly uncomfortable to watch, I think because they're basically a group of poorly-educated black men, probably unemployed since they have nothing better to do with their morning than hang around making fun of the hung-over white guys who passed out drunk in their neighborhood the previous night.
Loquat
3mo ago
Note, however, that the most dangerous sorts of street people may feel affronted by such a dog and initiate lethal violence against it, as in the case that inspired this classic Freddie deBoer article:
To be sure, Jessica Chrustic's golden retriever was not a trained personal-defense dog, but according to her testimony in other articles the dog did indeed attempt to defend her from the homeless man who was menacing her (and then beat the dog to death).
Loquat
3mo ago
A telescoping spear seems quite feasible to make, but in a country that bans guns I'd expect the law to take an extremely dim view of such a thing.
Loquat
3mo ago
Organized by Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action, a gun-safety group with about 10 million members, the video call included activists, podcasters, the singer Pink and regular voters, several who said they regretted not doing enough before the 2016 election that put Trump in the White House. [...] On Thursday's call for white women, participants discussed strategies, including reaching out to friend groups, fundraising and countering misinformation.
Are you a member in good standing of any well-connected Democrat activist groups? These calls are for loyal foot soldiers, not the general public.
Loquat
3mo ago
I honestly don't know how seriously to take this; I saw the Reuters article about the "White women for Kamala" call linked on /r/stupidpol and it included the following paragraph:
Hours after the announcement, more than 40,000 people joined a Zoom call for Black women supporters. One for Black men on Monday drew over 50,000 people and there have been separate calls for South Asian women, LGBTQ allies, and white men.
Are we really at the point as a society where we actually prefer having race- and gender-segregated meetings for a topic that's supposed to have broad-spectrum appeal? Or is this something everyone involved will look back on in embarrassment a year later?
Correction: people with two kids don't want a third, because car seat laws force you to buy a bigger car, which is still a substantial expense for most people.
See, car seats are usually so wide that you can't fit three in the back of a typical sedan or SUV, plus several states require kids to be in car seats or booster seats to a surprisingly high age - my home state of Pennsylvania doesn't allow kids to go without one until the age of 8!
And, y'know, we also have cheap and reliable contraceptives now, alongside all that cheap food.
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