𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍

It’s the angle. Can you hold your weight with your arms straight out to the sides? Sure, you can do push-ups, but can you do this?

or this?

Most people can’t.

That’s not how I meant it.

There’s a cultural value in virginity in girls. It’s pretty common across cultures: for marriage, virgin women are more desirable than non-virgins. It’s biased; the virginity only increases value for girls, and it probably stems from men wanting to be sure than any prodigy are actually theirs. Women can be nearly 100% sure a kid they have is theirs (not quite 100%, as there’s a brief period when a channeling swap could conceivably be made), but the men can never be certain. The best odds you have is to get yourself a virgin. So female virginity has been valued through history (by men), and I think this is where the fetish of having sex with virgins comes from.

That’s what I’m taking about. I’ve never understood the appeal of “being a girl’s/boy’s first.”

I have never, ever, understood the appeal of virginity. Who prefers someone who is uncomfortable, awkward, and doesn’t have any experience?

This has always baffled me. This is one reason why I think sex workers should hold a high status in society: they provide an valuable service in training the uninitiated and unskilled. It’s like taking tennis lessons, and all your future partners should be grateful for their lessons.

Man I hope there’s a brace across his back, because a human’s arms are not strong enough to overcome that much resistance.

But it there were a sturdy brace, that looks like almost enough resistance to keep him from dying, if he can keep from tumbling. Which he probably can’t.

Yeah, that guy’s best outcome is a lot of broken bones.

I didn’t mention Cleveland, but those ads are hilarious. At first I thought, because I was talking up Oregon, you were linking to one of these Oregon travel ads:

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Southern Florida? Like the man said: Florida: the more North you go, the more South it gets. Orlando seems mostly OK. Big city, opportunities, and there’s a NASA space center and launch facility not too far.

My mom lives there, and that’s about the limit of my knowledge. I will personally never again willingly live south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Oh, I hear that if you stay out of the little handle at the bottom, Missouri is nice. A friend from there once told me that if they’d cut off that handle and give it to Arkansas, it’d raise the average IQ of both states. Never been there, myself.

Lots of places in Oregon and Washington are great; large swaths are not, but if you’re not prone to SAD, there are great towns in the Willamette Valley: Corvallis, Eugene, and Ashville down on the California border. Also, California is enormous. N California is very different from S California, and the coast is enormously different from the interior. It’s a huge state, and painting it with a single brush is like saying Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, Washington DC, and Pennsylvania are all the same. It’s seriously about the same area as all those put together, lengthwise, at least. The greater LA/San Diego area alone is almost as big as your entire state. But the Pacific Northeast is wet if you live in the Valley, and there isn’t much in the way of big cities east of the Cascades.

How about Boise, ID? Good size college city, lots of microbreweries, lots of outdoor recreation, pretty great weather if you like hot, but you get snow in the winter, too. Plus nearly half the state is national park; fantastic backpacking.

Most of these places I mentioned specifically lean liberal, although when you venture into rural areas it gets red pretty quickly, like anywhere. An exception is Orange County in CA, which is full of really crazy red-hatters. But it sound like you’ve already ruled out at least part of CA, and “insufferable” makes me think you’re thinking specifically of S Cal.

Eugene is, or used to be, fantastic. Extremely liberal, and not trust-fund hippie style. Decent sized to be entertaining. You just have to put up with the weather and hippies, or whatever hippies have mutated into with successive generations. Pot’s legal in OR, too, if that’s your bag.

Bend, OR is one of the best places in the planet if you’re sporty. It’s high desert, but smack up against the mountains. In the summer, people rock climb and bike. In the winter, they ski Mt Bachelor. There’s fishing and camping, and at one point it had more restaurants per capita than any other city in the US. There’s no humidity. At all. Very pretty town. A 4 hour drive north, and you’re in Portland, OR, which isn’t what it used to be and has been having problems, but is still a large metro area with lots to do and a fantastic science center. 2 hrs West through the mountains is Salem, the capital, which frankly sucks; or or 3+ hours SW is the aforementioned Eugene. A couple hours south is Crater Lake. A couple three more hours and you’re in the N California Redwood forest. Oh, and if you do speed through So-Lame (Salem), another 1.5 hours and you’re on the Oregon coast, so 3-4 hours from Bend to the coast, mostly through a fantastic, amazing mountain range (and then the Valley and then the smaller coastal range).

If you want to stay on the E coast, I recommend the greater Philadelphia area. From there, NYC is a 3hr drive. The Jersey shore is a 3 hr drive. Washington DC is a 3 hr drive. Gettysburg is a 3 hr drive. Williamsburg, VA - possibly my favorite place in the US - is a 4-ish hour drive (depending on DC traffic). Plus, you can get to almost any of the coast cities from Philly by train, if you’re willing to sacrifice a couple more hours. Pennsylvania wasn’t my favorite place to live, but if you can stand living in S Carolina I’m sure it’d be fine for you.

Honestly, you might consider Minneapolis. It does get cold in the winter (-50F is the coldest I’ve experienced), but The Cities are fantastic, full of Art Deco architecture, and end-summer temps can hit the 100’s. In September, any of the literally over 10,000 lakes are bath-water warm. And we don’t have copperheads. The great lakes are close; we’re practically in the center of the country, so flying anywhere in the continental US is a 4-hour flight or less. The Cities are very progressive - again, you drive an hour outside and it’s Trump signs everywhere - par for the course - but within The Cities it’s quite nice. And the bike paths are incredible; miles and miles, and much of it completely off-road - at some point they took all the old industry rail lines and turned them into maintained bike and foot paths. It’s really quite remarkable. And the metro system isn’t half bad, for a US city. The humidity gets oppressive, but, again, you’re surviving S Carolina so I don’t think that’d be a problem for you.

Ah, but I agree with you! It’s commendable that we care for our weak who would otherwise die.

The other wolf, though, thinks there’s a good chance the stupid are going to drive us to extinction.

Thanks for not taking offense when you legitimately could have. Reason 1 why Lemmy > Reddit.

Maybe? Natural selection seems to work for the rest of everything in nature. But humans are special, aren’t we? Above nature; different rules apply to us, nature itself treats us differently.

I do agree that humans are fundamentally different in that more of our individual value is learned than inherited. OTOH, more of our value is learned than inherited, and that’s where the problem lies. It’s not there genes, it’s the parents and the parenting. I’m not suggesting we’ll improve humanity by removing stupidity through evolution; I’m saying there are a lot of people who I don’t believe are fit to raise children. And there’s a corpus of examples that could support that argument; how about that guy who literally shook his infant to death last week? Good father, him?

I’m not a parent myself, and I will never be one. Maybe I’d make a good father, maybe not. But I’m not breeding, so taking me out doesn’t affect the gene pool; I’m not playing in the gene pool.

And, no, I did not misunderstand the point. What I said was that if I could get a guarantee that others would also be removed, I’d volunteer to be in the group.

That was hyperbole, BTW; if I really believed it, I’d go to a Trump rally with a bunch of C4 and ball bearings wrapped around my torso. Even if I were an Einstein, it’d be a net benefit to humanity.

Dude. If I could guarantee that my sacrifice would also remove some N>1 number of dumbshits who shouldn’t be contributing to the ecological load the Earth’s ecosystem is bearing, I’d volunteer.

The Idiocracy intro got a lot of things right.

This is my favorite, mainly because it’s been well argued by some respectable scientists.

Another is that we’re in a simulation, and aliens aren’t part of it. There are also some very good statistics pointing to the simulation theory, from just sheer scale.

To paraphrase The San Saba Songbird, cats are excluded from the statutes of man, and many of the laws of the Almighty as well.

At first I read “Portland,” saw my mistake, shrugged and thought, “either way.”

I’ve never been to Poland. I’m sure it’s nicer than Portland.

Few abilities will protect you from muggings as the ability to squirt substances from your ass on demand.

Doesn’t it steal control flow? More like a break point, except you define where execution continues.

I wonder if it’s a compile error to have multiple conflicting COMEFROM statements, or if it’s random, kind of like Go’s select statement.

How awesome would it be to be able to steal the execution stack from arbitrary code; how much more awesome if it was indeterminate which of multiple conflicting COMEFROM frames received control! And if it included a state closure from the stolen frame?

Now I want this.

The ribbon is what makes it classy.

I admit, I made that assumption when I read “gluten”, too.

Thing is, back in oelden days, people with these sorts of allergies wouldn’t survive long enough to procreate. We’re breeding a species of increasingly fragile people - but that’s what is best about us, IMO: we take care of our weak. With any luck, gene editing will get to the point that it doesn’t matter what genetic defect you were born with; we’ll just tailor a cure, and everyone will have a chance.

It surprises me there’s a non-cyliac gluten allergy; gluten is what allowed us to create agricultural societies - I thought that’d been bred out long ago.

“Bred.” Ah-ha. Ah-ha.

Oh, hey @MissJinx; I haven’t seen you in a while.

I don’t think it was a stupid question; frankly, it’s not something I find intuitive. I have to stop and think about it. Also, living with someone with allergies makes you more aware of them, since your brain tends to purge knowledge you don’t use. I’d think it’s a curse - especially since my memory is shit to begin with - except that I know a couple of people with eidetic memories, and that can present its own problems.

I know one guy with an eiditic memory who has a problem with information that he learns wrong the first time. He has to build a sort of linked-list model in his brain for corrections, and then do a sort of very slow O(n) crawl of the list to end up with the right result. So say he’s introduced to you and they say your name is Becky; that gets stored in his memory. Then you correct them and say your name is “Susanne”, so he makes a “correction” link. But because someone coughed when you said it, he heard “Susan”, and that was w what got stored; so he has to make a second correction. From then on, whenever he runs into you he has to go through this “Becky” -> “Susan” -> “Susanne” process, and he says it’s real slow and can take a couple of seconds, and longer if there are more corrections. That seems a poor trade-off to me for being able to glance at a page and then repeat it back verbatim by reading the picture in his memory.

Look at the front steps, and where they meet the white step. The whole house is crooked.

This is why you don’t get nuts when traveling on an airplane carrying a passenger with a nut allergy. Allergic responses vary wildly. You might have a mild allergy that gives you a rash if you eat too much of something. Or, you might go into anaphylactic shock if you breath air that’s had nuts in it.

My wife has an autoimmune disease that’s triggered by foods. Some foods more than others, and there’s some tolerance to each. She shouldn’t eat capsicum, but she loves spicy food, and she can eat some, but it she eats it too often, she gets a response flare. OTOH, she can’t have any amount of dairy: the response is rapid, and severe, and she has to take steroids to get it under control. Luckily, she’s not sensitive to anything (that we’ve found, anyway) that triggers a response from the molecules in the air.

Oh, there are two things you may have forgotten: first, when you smell something, you’re literally tasting molecules of that thing; second, your skin is your body’s largest organ, and you can absolutely ingest stuff through your skin. That’s how Novichok, and other nerve agents, work.

C99 is better. Always will be.

Fight me.