Something about Chabad-Lubavitch and Brooklyn rang some bells for me, which isn’t normally the kind of thing that would catch my attention, so I figured I must have seen something particularly weird about them in the news in the not-too-distant past.

And only one weird story from New York about Orthodox Jews comes to mind for me personally, and sure enough it was Chabad-Lubavitch that was involved in the Synagogue tunnel incident

Not that I think there’s any direct correlation between these two incidents, I’m mostly just bringing it up for anyone else who had the same “why does that name ring a bell” feeling.

Honduras? No, of course not, that would be ridiculous.

She’s in CECOT now.

/S, hopefully

When they try to leave they just tend to not get very far because they never learned how to pump their own gas.

Just as an FYI, aerodynamics can be a little complicated, it depends on the exact vehicle, the speeds you’re going, etc. but there’s a lot of cases where a tonneau cover will actually hurt your mpg.

Price is definitely the thing holding me back from a new vehicle as well, even though the maverick is one of the more affordable trucks out there it’s still too rich for my blood. I have a friend who just got one though, so I plan on using him as a guinea pig for the next few years until a new car is hopefully in my budget.

It does only have the bumper, I’ve never looked into it because we’ve never needed to tow anything. We have the long bed so anything we’ve ever needed to haul fit in there just fine.

I love that truck. It has yet to hit 100k miles because until the last couple years my parents had 3 vehicles and especially now that they’re retired they never really go anywhere anyway.

And for a 32 year old truck, it still gets pretty decent gas mileage, pretty damn close to 20mpg, the new rangers don’t beat that by much.

It’s not without its downsides, it’s rwd so it’s kind of shitty on anything but dry pavement unless you have some weight in the bed, and it’s 0-60 time is probably best stated as “eventually,” but it’s done everything I’ve ever needed a truck to do.

If Ford came out with basically that exact truck with a modern engine to get better gas mileage but otherwise kept the performance the same, it would probably be my next vehicle. Wouldn’t mind AWD/4wd too but I could live without.

I really like the maverick but the small bed is kind of a deal breaker. I’ve heard some rumors that they may add a midgate in a couple years to open the bed up into the back seat so if they do that I’m probably sold.

Yeah, for towing that’s basically useless unless you’re only using it to tow around a wood splitter or something.

That said, my family has had a 1993 Ford ranger for many years. I’m pretty sure even with the 4-cylinder engine it still has a towing capacity several times that much, but we have never towed anything with it. We have gotten a lot of use out of it as a truck though, moving furniture, camping gear, small loads of firewood, trips to the hardware store, etc.

I can also potentially see this being big for certain fleet vehicles. Growing my dad worked on a military base as a civilian in their wastewater treatment plant. Part of his job involved driving around the base once a day or so to take water samples from a couple places. The public works department had a couple small trucks, Chevy S10 I think, that he’d use for that. They got used by other public works employees, never for anything particularly heavy duty but they did occasionally tote around some bulky tools, equipment, materials, but a significant amount of what they used them for could probably have used a golf cart. I’d be amazed if those trucks went 10 miles most days, they sat most of the time, kind of a perfect sort of situation for them to sit on a charger.

First of all, this isn’t something I support, I don’t trust literally anything this administration does, and it’s not really something I want my tax dollars spent on

But taking a step back, when I think about it, I’m a little surprised the pentagon doesn’t already have one.

Pretty much anyone who goes on TV is getting a quick once over by the hair/makeup/wardrobe people. And it’s not like they don’t host press conferences and such at the pentagon with some frequency.

And the military is all about appearances - uniforms, hairstyle regulations, polished boots, etc. If you’re putting some military bigwig in front of a camera, that’s, in part, a propaganda opportunity, so you want them to look the part

True, I did think about mentioning that but decided to skip over it to keep things simple.

Animals like cows for example, can get by almost entirely on fiber. Stuff like grass doesn’t have much in the way of carbs we can use, but it contains a ton of fiber, and cows digestive systems are set up to actually do something with them.

The extra “stomachs” they have allow for some extra fermentation and such to happen so they can break down that fiber into simpler carbs.

Gonna try to give a very general ELI5 sort of answer

There’s basically 3 main types of carbohydrates

Simple carbs- basically sugars (mono- and di-saccharides)

Complex carbs- starches, whole grains, etc. (polysaccharides)

Fiber- arguably these are just really complex carbs that your body can’t really break down

In general, sugars are the source of energy your body actually runs on, especially glucose. Everything else basically gets broken down into glucose.

Your body can pretty much use simple sugars as-is or can easily break them down into a form it can use. There’s some variation just how quick and easy it is for your body to use different sugars, but in general your body will start to feel the effects of eating sugar in the space of a few minutes, and the effects will peak within about an hour or two.

Complex carbs take a little more digesting to break down into a form your body can make use of. They’re basically being turned into simpler sugars, but that process takes a while. You might hear about athletes carbo-loading with a big spaghetti dinner or something the night before a big competition. The idea there is that the energy from that big, complex carb-heavy dinner won’t really hit them for a few hours or even until the next day, and it will keep providing that energy for a longer period of time.

Fiber is, for the most part, indigestible, your body can’t really break it down into simpler sugars that it can make use of. It goes in your mouth, through your digestive tract, and out the other end relatively unchanged. That doesn’t mean it’s useless though, it still plays an important role in digestion. It takes up space in your stomach helping you feel more full. It absorbs water and helps keep your stool soft and helps waste move through your intestines, and it minds to things like bile acids and cholesterol so that they can be passed as waste.

Again, this is meant to be a very general answer, there’s a lot of details I’m glossing over both just to keep things simple, and because I’m not a doctor or anything of the sort and I’m not 100% sure myself.

My first exposure to the word “Kafkaesque” was on the show Mission Hill, with a character complaining about how often people misuse it. I didn’t really understand what it meant, I was like 12 years old staying up late to watch it on adult swim, not quite the target audience for either the show or Kafka.

As I got older and began to understand the world better, that colored my perception a bit, I heard a lot of people use and more often misuse it, and little clips of Mission Hill played in the back of my mind.

I miss the days when everyone seemed to be misusing the word “Kafkaesque.” Now it seems like you can slap that label on just anything and it would be accurate. It’s almost hard to misuse it anymore.

Please, no meat-touching, ma’am.

It’s definitely the wrong vibe a lot of times, but it’s also a weird balancing act.

I like to think my county has our shit together about as well as anywhere in the country (which is admittedly a fairly low bar) We do have some other resources available to us that we try to make use of, like a mobile crisis team (which is technically some sort of private non profit entity that receives county funding and works with us and our police departmens very closely, but it’s not something that we can directly dispatch in the same way we can send police/fire/EMS)

And they do a lot of good, they go out and respond to calls from people who need their assistance, and often handle things just fine on their own.

But a lot of times we find ourselves getting calls from those teams because they went out to make contact with someone, who they spoke with and who requested their assistance, but started getting aggressive so they need police to assist them.

And I’ve been on the phone with a lot of situations that have taken some crazy turns, where it starts out sounding like a totally boring, routine call for an officer to come out and take a report or address some minor issue, and suddenly everyone is yelling, punches are being thrown, something is on fire, etc.

So in the interest of safety, a lot of non-police calls probably should still have police respond as well, they just need to strike a happy balance where they’re waiting outside or something, ready to bust in if needed, but otherwise they’re not directly involving themselves in the situation.

But overall, a whole lot of my calls would probably be best resolved if we could force people to sit down with a middle school guidance counselor and learn how to take a deep breath, count to 10, use their inside voices, and listen to each other.

I am fairly certain I fall somewhere on the autistic spectrum. Somewhere at the top end on the mild/high-functioning/low-support-needs/however-you-want-to-describe-it.

I’ve never felt a need to pursue a diagnosis, I don’t think putting it on paper and making it official has anything to offer me that’s worth the aggravation of dealing with extra doctors appointments and such to get diagnosed.

But I’ve occasionally considered doing it so that I could potentially participate in any sort of research being done that might possibly help autistic people with higher support needs. That would be worth the aggravation.

But holy fuck does this administration make me glad I never did.

I always had a little paranoia that a diagnosis would be more trouble than it’s worth beyond just the annoyance of getting diagnosed. That somewhere I’d encounter some bullshit regulation where I’d be considered mentally unfit for something, or be disqualified from a job, or just have people treating me different if they found out.

But now it’s very clear that that’s sort of the plan, where a diagnosis would probably be actively used against me instead of just being the result weird edge cases where I might slip through the cracks due to some outdated poorly worded policy.

I believe in Iceland’s case it has to do with how the Icelandic language works and certain names just kind of don’t work with the rest of the language. I’m far from an expert on the Icelandic language, but my understanding is that nouns, names included, sort of get “conjugated” (I’m not sure if “conjugation” is the correct term, I think that’s specifically a vowel thing, but it’s similar in that the word changes depending on how it’s used in a sentence and most of us are familiar with the concept of conjugation.)

There’s a few random things in English that do it, like depending on the sentence, you might use I/me/my/mine/etc. when you refer to yourself refer to yourself, but in icelandic all nouns do that in a regular predictable way, so they have to be pronounceable with certain suffixes tacked onto them.

I think they also do the old school patronymic/matronymic name thing instead of family names. So if you meet someone in Iceland whose name is something like “Steve Robertson” then “Robertson” isn’t his family name, his dad is literally named “Robert” and so he is “Steve, Robert’s Son” so names kind of have to work with that kind of naming convention as well.

So it’s less of a “this name is stupid” and more of a “this name breaks our language”

It also seems like they’ve eased up on some of the rules in recent years, first names are no longer gender restricted, and they’ve added a nonbinary suffix for the patronyms/matronyms so now you can be a -bur instead of just -son or -dóttir

I have a friend who’s grandfather was a chemist who at least claimed to his family that he mixed up small batches of DDT for mosquito control on his property.

I have no way of verifying that, but I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if some rogue chemist with a vendetta against mosquitos was out there doing it.

I overall agree that the concerns are overblown and sometimes outright fake, and that artificial colors aren’t inherently any more dangerous than any other ingredient

I also agree that Kennedy and his ilk are really using this as a smokescreen for all the other bullshit they’re up to

That said, I’m largely in favor of banning artificial dyes.

Pretty much the only purpose they serve is to make unhealthy processed junk food more attractive, so I think we should be discouraging that.

There is some evidence that some artificial dyes may be harmful in some ways. In the grand scheme of hazardous chemicals I’m expected to in my life they’re near the bottom of the list of things I’m concerned about, probably falling somewhere in between alcohol and grilled meat (neither of which I’m planning to cut out of my diet anytime soon, but I also enjoy those things so I’m more willing to accept the risk, I’m pretty ambivalent about whether or not my food is exactly the right color)

I work in 911 dispatch, a lot of my coworkers are predictably bootlickers.

I can’t even tell you how many calls we get all day everyday where we’re all just left scratching our head going “Why did you call 911,about this? This isn’t a police issue.” But since usually the only tool we have in our toolbox is police, that’s what we end up having to send.

But they’ll balk at any suggestion that maybe our police don’t need a new armored truck and a new police station, and whatever other stupid shit they’re spending tax dollars on, and instead maybe we should spend that money to beef up our mental health services, public works, homeless outreach, animal control, code enforcement, and other services that we could be providing instead of just sending police out to deal with non-police issues.

Luckily, my local police are pretty good as far as police go, not too trigger happy, generally make a decent effort to handle mental health issues carefully, they usually manage to not make things significantly worse, though they often don’t do much to improve the situation either.

In a sort of abstract sense, there are some parallels.

In a system like the US, corporations and those with a lot of money hold a lot of power, and unionization is a way for everyone else to take some power for themselves to make sure that their voices are heard.

In a system like China however, most of that power is instead concentrated with the government and upper echelons of party, so attempts at democratizing fill a similar role of giving regular people a voice.

There’s a lot of nitty gritty details, cultural differences, etc. and I don’t really want to gloss over those, but the root in either case is common people organizing and trying to make sure their voices are heard.

I work in 911 dispatch, a lot of the 10 digit non emergency lines also redirect to our center, we get a lot of wrong numbers calling into us

One of those numbers is just one digit off from a pizza place, which is always fun because once in a while someone is a domestic calls in pretending to order pizza because they don’t want the person they’re with to know they’re calling police, so we kind of have to grill those calls with are you having an emergency/do you know you’re calling the police/are you safe to talk kind of questions

Pro tip for anyone who finds themselves in a situation like that, most dispatch centers are aware of those types of calls, but some posts online will tell you that there’s a code that pepperoni = they have a gun or something like that. No such code exists, at least not in any way that’s universally recognized. Maybe some departments have that standardized but it certainly wasn’t part of my training.

I’ve labeled the outside world as “outer space” and the basement stairs as “the abyss” for mine.

Well we do have an emergency, the catch is that the emergency is the person implementing the tariffs.