There’s a small part of me that has kind of wished that this kind of pseudo age verification was a thing for a while (even though there’s a much bigger part that doesn’t want any corporation to know a damn thing about me.)

I remember swinging through Walmart once to pick up a couple things.

My cart had, IIRC, some deodorant (old spice classic,) masking tape, a can of spray paint, some plumbing parts, a few fishing lures, socks, and a couple of snacks.

I had one of those “I’ve become my dad” moments looking at my cart. I feel like that shopping list is practically a distillation of every suburban dad who’s ever existed.

But of course, I rang up the spray paint, and an employee had to come over to confirm that I was in fact some boring suburban white dude and not a teenager who was going to use it for mischief or huff it to get high.

Maybe I’m giving the juvenile delinquents of today too little credit, or maybe my fellow grown-ups too much, but I feel like the venn diagram of people buying fishing lures, a new toilet flapper, and socks, has basically no overlap with vandals and paint-sniffers.

So I kind of felt like maybe the almighty algorithm could have picked up on that and let me skip having the underpaid giving me a quick looking-at before punching his code into the self-checkout.

At work I once received a call from someone who worked at a tree service company- trimming trees, tree removal, relocating trees, etc.

She identified herself as the branch manager.

I’ve known muskies to do something similar- swim around at the surface with their head out of the water.

I remember looking into it, and it’s definitely a thing, but no one seems to know why exactly they do it. There’s a few theories that have to do with the oxygen concentration at the surface, regulating temperature, buoyancy, etc. but the one I personally like to subscribe to is the same as this, that they’re just looking around.

It makes me feel a little less bad about not being able to catch one if they’re at least more intelligent and curious than the average bass or bluegill or whatever else I’m pulling out of their lake.

We’re at or reaching a tipping point where I’m not sure that’s true anymore.

Most people with kids now are (roughly) in their 20s-40s. At the older end of that range, you have some gen-xers who might have missed the boat on computer literacy, but by and large we’re talking about millennials and older gen-z at this point. Kids who grew up with the internet, probably very clearly remember their family getting their first computer if they didn’t already have one when they were born, had computer classes in school, etc.

And we’re running into an issue where younger Gen z and alpha in many cases are less computer literate in many ways. A lot of them aren’t really learning to use a computer so much as they are smartphones and tablets, and I’m not knocking how useful those devices can be, I do damn-near everything I need to do on my phone, but they are limited compared to a PC and don’t really offer as much of an opportunity to learn how computers work.

There’s a ton of exceptions to that of course, some of my millennial friends are still clueless about how to do basic things on a computer, and some children today are of course learning how to do anything and everything on a computer or even on a phone.

But overall, I don’t think there’s as much disparity in technological literacy between the children and parents of today as there was in previous generations, and in some ways that trend may have even reversed.

Before I was born, my grandfather dropped dead of a heart attack

Common enough story, except

They were visiting family in Poland, we’re American

And this was the 1980s

So the problem was how to get a corpse back to the US.

Embalming was not common in Poland at the time, not sure what the current situation is there, but in this case it was kind of needed. Shipping something the size of a casket across the atlantic on short notice is kind of a lot to figure out for normal people in the best of times, but especially tricky for a bereaved family, in a foreign country, where they barely speak the language, and a whole host of Cold war political bullshit, and this was no small feat.

So they managed to find one of the few local funeral homes who were able to embalm him

And stuffed him into the cheapest wooden coffin they could acquire to ship him back.

And of course, there were some customs hold-ups that delayed things to make sure they weren’t smuggling anything back with him I suppose.

I believe the whole process took a few weeks.

Luckily American money went a long way in Poland at the time. My family is not wealthy, but they were basically treated like celebrities there, flash a little American cash and you were bumped to the front of the line and got preferential treatment for everything, and from the US perspective, everything was dirt cheap.

A couple stories to illustrate that- one day they’re out in Warsaw with their relative Wojtek, and they’re looking for a place to eat. My grandfather spied a nice-looking restaurant. They go to the door and Wojtek is told that they wouldn’t be able to seat them. My grandfather gets a bit angry and points out that the restaurant was almost empty. When they found out they had Americans with them they were welcomed in with open arms.

My grandfather ordered a steak, Wojtek got a bit of sticker shock seeing the menu and ordered a hot dog. When my grandfather found out that’s what he ordered, he called the waiter back over and told them that Wojtek would also have a steak. He said it was too late and they’d already started the hot dog, so my grandfather said to wrap them up and they’d take them to go, and ordered the steak. A steak dinner there for the whole group, probably around 4-6 people, cost peanuts for an American at the time, but the Polish relatives they were staying with had been saving up things like sugar rations for weeks or months in preparation for hosting my family, and steak was definitely not on their regular menu.

There’s also the story of when Wojtek visited the US (coincidentally at the exact same time as the USSR fell apart, but that’s another long story) and literally broke down in tears at the sight of an American grocery store. I know the grocery store they would have went to, it was not a big or particularly impressive store, today it is a kind of small-ish CVS.

Another time while in Poland (they visited several times back in the day) my grandmother went to get her hair done while she was there. She worked as a hair dresser for most of her life, so while she was waiting in line she was watching them cut hair, and pointed out one lady and said that she wanted her to do her hair. She was told that’s not how things worked there and that shed get whoever was available when it was her turn. Until she flashed some American cash and they bumped her up to the front of the line so she could have her hair cut by the hair dresser she wanted.

Anyway, circling back to my dead grandfather, they eventually got his body back to the US, stuffed him into a nicer casket, had a funeral, and there he is to the ground to this day.

But the story doesn’t quite end there. What became of the casket they shipped him back in?

It sat in the funeral homes attic for a couple decades. It was cheap, but it wasn’t a bad casket, just not what’s in-demand for the American funeral industry, and believe it or not, there’s not a lot of demand (or supply for that matter) for second-hand caskets.

Then one day, some guy, who actually happens to be a second cousin or something of mine, decides he wants an actual coffin to use as a Halloween decoration. So he calls around to the local funeral homes to see what they can do for him.

He calls up this place, and they basically say “we have just the thing for you” and so that’s where that is now.

I think this is something that’s going to vary a lot depending on where in the world you are

I’m not a beach fan for a large number of reasons, including the fact that, in the immortal words of Anakin Skywalker, “I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere”

But just as bad is that all of the beaches that are a reasonable drive from my house for a day or weekend trip are always packed, and I don’t like crowds much either.

I have no doubts in my mind that trump and Epstein were as good friends as two narcissistic assholes are capable of being.

But it’s also pretty damn clear to me that trump isn’t exactly the letter-writing type.

I suspect how this all played out is that Maxwell was putting together this book for Epstein, and reached out to trump for his contribution

And so trump had some lackey throw together something appropriately sleazy for it and just signed it wherever he was told to sign.

And I don’t think that’s even just a trump thing, I’m pretty sure just about any celebrity, politician, etc. has staff whose job is to answer mail for them.

And he’s too much of a moron and narcissistic asshole to say that, so instead he’s going all-in on it being forged.

But if he were someone with a half functioning brain, that’s all he would need to say “I am a very busy man, so I can’t remember every piece of mail I sent 20 years ago, I probably had an intern write it for me, and I just signed where they told me to, I probably didn’t even read it, I trusted my staff to write a good letter because I have the best people working for me”

And boom totally plausible, keeps the whole thing at arms-length from himself, and probably pretty damn close to the truth.

Two spaces at the end of the line
Will give you what you’re looking for

• Markdown also supports
• Using asterisks followed by a space at the beginning of the line
• To create bullet points like this

1. Or numbered lists
2. Like this one
3. Which is pretty much just what-you-see-is-what-you-get

My wife and I work different schedules. on the rare day off that were both home, she’s often out of the house when I wake up. She’s not great at replying to texts. I never know when she’s going to be home, and usually have no clue what she’s out doing or where.

But I know who she’s doing while she’s gone- no one. Because I trust my wife. I know who she is as a person, I know what our relationship is like.

I have no particular desire to know her location at all times. I’m sure if I asked, she’d share it with me, and I’d do the same for her. I might occasionally do that when I’m off hiking or something in case there’s an emergency, but half the time I wouldn’t have a signal anyway.

We are two humans with our own lives. Those lives are very intertwined, but we’re both allowed to go off and have our own adventures, occasionally some secrets, and we don’t need to know where each other is 24/7

I’ve been a somewhat regular NPR listener for years

It of course carries from one program or station to another but my general impression is that, no surprise, nearly everyone involved in NPR is pretty solidly liberal.

But they bend over backwards so far trying to be impartial that it almost becomes a parody sometimes.

I remember one time, I’m pretty sure it was around the time of the unite the right thing, I was listening to some segment where they had some neonazi piece of shit on, I think it may have been Richard Spencer

And while it was technically a really good and informative interview, it burned me up that they just weren’t tearing into this piece of crap.

And to make matters worse, Nazi boy was really confident and well-spoken, and whoever they brought in to argue the other side, some lady from a university or something, simply wasn’t. If I weren’t listening to the actual words coming out of their mouths I would’ve gotten the impression that he was someone who really had his shit together, and she was some clueless dip shit they bribed into the studio by offering her free kombucha or something.

It was like they went out of their way to make it seem like maybe this guy had a point worth listening too and didn’t deserve to just be taken out back of the studio and shot.

I feel like a lot of people are going to take that as some sort of anti-space program sentiment, which may or may not be your point.

But for those people, I think it’s worth considering that we don’t know what all of those environmental challenges are until we go to space and find out.

One way or another, earth will become uninhabitable, whether by our own hand thanks to climate change nuclear war, etc. or by some natural phenomenon that we are powerless to prevent- gamma ray burst, asteroid impact, the sun dying out

In all likelihood, we won’t have to worry about those natural disasters for hundreds, thousands, millions, or even billions of years, but we don’t actually know that for sure. For all we know, we could just be days away from destruction by some ridiculously powerful space-bullshit that we don’t even know to be worried about yet.

We aren’t always going about space exploration in the right ways or for the right reasons, but every tiny step we take does inch us closer to a better understanding of what’s all out there in the universe, what dangers it presents to us, and how we can avoid or counteract those dangers.

If we hadn’t been sending astronauts into space for the better part of the last century, we wouldn’t know that it might cause these kinds of vision problems, and so we wouldn’t know to work on a solution for that to have it ready for when it’s really needed. Sure would suck to have all of our other ducks in a row to set up a sustaining Mars colony or whatever, only to find out when we got there that 70% of our colonists can’t see right due to the trip there. Now we know, and we can work on a solution, whether it’s bioengineering, or special contact lenses, or whatever may be needed.

I think we’re going to need some details or pictures of how your couch is constructed and how it broke to really answer this

Since you mention unscrewing the other legs, could you just go out to home Depot (or local equivalent big hardware store) and purchase 4 of something like this and replace them?