This is why I go out of my way quite a bit to poison the AI with my pointless boomer anecdotes, largely made up or confiscated. Plus, I rarely proof read my comments anymore, so apologies for the grammatical issues and the hard to believe and rarely either one way or the other but twice the times there’s another type of type that you can also quite not, right?

Also interesting reading the comments about how many other countries are wrong. I have a hunch this entire graphic is wrong.

I certainly would not be surprised if there are some inaccuracies, but of the comments I’ve read so far suggesting that the numbers don’t capture the truth appear to be misunderstanding what the data is showing (nationwide statutory paid time off and paid public holidays).

As an example, you mentioned the 7 paid federal holidays in the USA. But similar to some of the other observations in question, those aren’t what this graphic is capturing. Outside of government jobs and maybe certain industries, those 7 public holidays are not required by statute on a nationwide level – it’s not even close to applying to everyone. Even if we agree that most jobs give people paid time off (but not because they are legally required to) or that some states require it, that’s still not what this graphic is showing, so those don’t make the 0 in any way inaccurate.

It’s like dun-dun dun dun-dun-dun dun dun dun-dun. DUHN-DUHN DUHN-DUHN-DUHN-DUHN DUHN DUHN DUHN-DUHN.

I don’t know if it’s my “favourite” but I remember how hilarious it was the first time I heard that original Resident Evil line about “you, the master of unlocking”. Granted, at the time I assumed it was all intentional B-grade horror movie parody.

Honestly, I know it’s not the same, but that’s why I have always gravitated towards “news aggregators”, basically the sites that bore progeny like Reddit and Lemmy, where you’re presented with links to news or random websites and people have their say about it in the comments.

I never heard of Third Voice and truthfully anything that is 100% reliant on a third party app or plugin / extension / mod / etc probably isn’t my bag of tea, but still a cool idea.

For me personally it’s the “almost nothing else” that went into the dishwasher with the plunger that truly pushed the narrative into holy shit territory.

My experience has been starkly different from Sterile_Techniques and I’m also living in what might be termed as “the middle of Ya’ll Quaeda” USA. So, it’s interesting to hear that there’s such a big difference in opinion / understanding on this topic.

For sure, 20 - 25 years ago it seemed like almost nobody had heard of it, and whenever someone said they were allergic to meat because of a tick bite, there was a lot of skepticism and denial.

However, these days, pretty much everybody knows someone who has this allergy, and that’s no exaggeration. Even the most backwoods, anti-science, do my own thing, fuck your feelings kind of people are telling others to check themselves for ticks and/or taking steps to keep ticks off them because they’re aware of all the risks from tick bites. Now, they might be claiming that it’s government bio-warfare, related to 5G and/or covid, or some other unnecessarily contrarian bullshit, but they do take it seriously from what I’ve experienced.

Also, the good news is (or bad news I guess depending on your perspective) is that a lot of people seem to experience improvement of symptoms in time, so it’s not necessarily a permanent thing for everybody. I don’t know if it’s just that some people continue to test the limits and end up inadvertently putting themselves through exposure therapy or if the immune response itself just naturally wanes over time, but several people I know who’ve had this for 5 - 10+ years say they can usually get away with a small amount of mammal meat, like maybe a hotdog now and then at a minimum, even though a small bite would have caused them a lot of trouble when they first developed the allergy.

The single, simple answer is the one that you don’t want to hear: There is no clean split. Bats are a large and diverse group of flying mammals just like birds are a large and diverse group of flying dinosaurs.

The simplest answer I can come up with (because it’s actually a very complicated and convoluted topic that I wouldn’t truly do just anyway) is: Most birds can fly because they are an offshoot of one group of dinosaurs (avian dinosaurs) that survived the last great extinction when their non-flying non-avian dinosaur relatives did not. Basically the ones that couldn’t fly mostly went extinct. And mammals mostly don’t fly, which is possibly because several groups of vertebrates beat them to it and essentially filled all the niches that would have been available to flying animals, kind of blocking that path for them.

Obviously that’s nowhere near the full story. There are lots of other factors at play, like some of the peculiarities of mammalian and dinosaur physiology that made one group better suited to flight than the other, ramifications of the great extinction that killed non-avian dinosaurs as well as most large animals in general and whole swaths of other species, and so on.

I don’t think of it in that mind frame, to be honest.

To me it’s our bodies that have evolved a general reaction to foreign proteins / materials with an inflammatory response (which can feel itchy), though that’s obviously the watered down way of thinking about it that doesn’t really capture the full picture.

Often times I don’t even know there’s a mosquito on me unless I happen to see it. Some species are just super tiny and don’t seem to cause any pain when they feed. Others are so large that they “itch” (i.e. you can feel their presence) just from them landing on you, whether they have time to bite or not. Either way, it’s not the pain or itchiness that motivate me to keep their populations under control, it’s primarily concerns over the spread of disease.

For most species of mosquito, humans aren’t really their primary target nor are humans the main source of food for them. And, it’s only been in very recent history that humanity has had any ability to control mosquito populations on a large scale, not even a blip on the evolutionary scale. So give it time, maybe those of us who don’t get itchy from mosquito bites are the fittest amongst us from an evolutionary standpoint and eventually those genes that lead to itchy reactions will go extinct. But I don’t think that there’s any significant evolutionary pressure on mosquitos as a result of how itchy or not itchy their bites are.

I’ve never heard of that one specifically and could find no sources mentioning it online. So, I’m being up front when I say I do not know the specific answer.

Having said that, sometimes if we’re building out scenarios in our minds based on an inaccurate or flawed premise, that can also lead to flawed outcome in our logic. For instance, is it actually truly possible to get a 430 on any family member that you want … like just because? And if so, is it possible there are other extenuating circumstances that you might not be considering (ex: Trump is not a family member, none of your family members are president of the United States, etc) which could explain why things might lead to a different outcome between your family member(s) and Trump?

Having said that and given the additional context you provided (i.e. Mental Examination), I’m wondering if it’s a situation where the individual needs to be more of an immediate threat to the health / life of themselves or others before it’s applicable? Even if you did try to make that case (because I know at least some people would), it’s likely not a case where any random person can just make an accusation / report against a well-known public figure to whom they have no clear social ties and expect it to be taken seriously.

Also, this wouldn’t apply to the president of the USA, but even people who legitimately do need some kind of immediate institutionalization often can’t get it when they need it. It would be an understatement to say that the mental health facilities in this country are overwhelmed and underfunded.

I see this from two different perspectives:

1. There are some ingredients I just don’t like the taste of. But, in some recipes and if prepared properly, I’m fine with them. Green beans are an example. I don’t like them. But creamy green bean casseroles are fine and vegetable soup with green beans is totally acceptable.

2. Then there are things like desserts that I’m picky about because if I’m going to screw up my metabolism and caloric intake for the day, it better damn well be worth it. I’m not going to waste my time on a substandard sugar and/or fat filled treat. I’m going to skip on that dry cake, jello salad, faux ice cream, fake chocolate sludge, etc.

Same here, I’m in the Southeastern USA. Monarchs are one of those species I pay attention to, and this spring we had a bumper crop around here. I’ve never seen so many of the caterpillars and adults in the past 10 years or so I’ve made an effort to look.

Granted, that’s also true for the handful of other butterfly and moth species I keep tabs on, they’re all having a really good year this year it seems. Luna moths, several different swallowtail species, Gulf fritillary, regal moths, hummingbird butterflies. About the only thing that I’ve seen less of this year are the giant hummingbird hawk moths.

But these things do tend to ebb and flow. One year certain “bugs” are everywhere, the next year they’re hardly seen. And with the monarch lifecycle being what it is, one good year like this one, even if it’s good in more than one region, isn’t a guarantee of long term success.

Really depends on the situation.

If I’m just feeding myself, I have no issue with going outside and foraging for food. I don’t hunt, but I’m not the type that needs an animal based protein main entree in my meals, so it works/worked for me to collect wild vegetables, fruits, and fungi.

And from there, I eat whatever is cheapest. Grocery store mark-downs and deep-discount sales would guide my decisions. If an acquaintance was giving away food, I’d take it. When the food bank is doing a giveaway and it was close enough for me to visit, I’d go there and take what they had to offer.

At my poorest, when I had no access to a kitchen, peanut butter sandwiches were a mainstay. Tuna sandwiches were next best, but more expensive. At the time, powdered milk was a bit of a luxury, but it definitely helped wash down the peanut butter and was way cheaper by volume than fresh milk.

A lot of stores and restaurants, at least where I live, will have condiment packages out in the open. Don’t go hog wild, but my experience is nobody cares/notices if you grab a few packs of whatever items are out: ketchup, mustard, mayo, honey, hot sauce, soy sauce, salt, and pepper – in moderation – so those can be free to you to use for meal prep.

When I’ve just been broke and/or saving money, my main protein was usually chicken. I’d just buy whatever was cheapest on sale, and try to stock up a bit or get rain checks. Then I could cook that in a crock pot and literally have meals for days. Around Thanksgiving and Christmas, turkey usually goes on deep discount and there are almost always a myriad of programs that just give them away. If you have room in your freezer and a crock pot, then you can be set just from that.

Add in some rice and/or beans/legumes to soak up the flavor when cooking meats.

Eggs were also always a solid choice, pretty versatile because they could be hard boiled, scrambled, fried, mixed into other things like noodles, or used to cook/bake other dishes.

Potatoes were another cheap source of carbohydrates, something that goes on sale often enough that I could usually find a deal, and if properly stored (cool, dark, dry) they can last a long time. Plus, they can go into the slow cooker with some chicken thighs and both ingredients benefit flavor-wise.

So, meals would be whatever combination of those things you can physically obtain. Your meal items don’t have to have a name. If you have potatoes and mix those with scrambled eggs and mix in some wild dandelions, that’s still a meal even if that’s not going to show up in a recipe book. If you boil some noodles and add in some mayo and a pinch of rosemary from a bush you saw down the road, that’s still a meal. Basically, just get creative with what you’ve got.

In the end, it doesn’t even matter.

Really, I just want to figure out a way to make a stable, livable income without having to become a corporate wage slave again. The corporate wage slave part is negotiable.

Because according to a super popular post from earlier today as far as I can tell there are alligators in Egypt and that’s totally funny because “the Nile” kinda sounds like the word “denial” depending on your regional accent and your ability to turn your brain cells off?

I’m a purist. The stable and persistent main branch, regardless of what you want to call it, should always and only ever be exactly the same as the code that’s currently deployed to the production server. Generally the only exception is for the short duration between a push and deployment under normal circumstances.

But every job I’ve ever had, there’s at least one maverick who knows git way better than anybody else and is super advanced, so they do their own thing which is totally better in a million different ways but essentially fucks everybody else over. And I’m not even here to say they aren’t smarter than the rest of us and I’m sure that somehow their process is better than what we currently do. But with version control, my anecdotal experience has been that the most important things for running smoothly are: consistency and having everybody on the same page. Process doesn’t need to be perfect, maximally efficient, bleeding edge, etc to achieve that.

To be honest, I’m just looking forward to the massive tax savings and ridiculously lowered tax bill I’m one billion percent sure is going to materialize in 2026 from all the DOGE savings we’ve attained. Totally holding my breath on that one. Do cremated remains even pay taxes? Who the fuck am I kidding, this is the USA, of course they do.

I’ll be interested to read the other comments when I have the time/attention span.

It could just be the part of the country where I live (i.e. deeply conservative rural south), but everybody I know who identifies as a Libertarian (going to hand wave over the reality of whether the pedants and purists would agree) is basically what’s termed as “Republican-lite” or “Conservative-lite” aka right-wing.

If I tell you I’m a Libertarian, but my voting record is such that I’ve essentially only voted for Republican candidates in all prominent elections in the past decade (or sometimes more) and/or the majority of my political speech is in opposition to Democratic politicians and liberal policies, what does that suggest?

If I identify as a vegan but I like to eat meat with every meal, am I really a vegan?

… and nobody is there to poop on it, does it even bear repeating at all?