Man, you're so right about that. I had a similar experience.

I had an art class in middle school and was enjoying the hands on craft part of it, and getting to see the final output of the unique things everyone created. For one assignment, we had potted plants on our shared tables and were given paints and canvas and told to paint what we saw. I painted the plant like I saw it, trying to get all the leaves looking like the one leaf I saw that didn't have any blemishes on it, and I got an F. I only understood after getting the F, that the instructor wanted was us to paint were the exact colors and lines and light our eyes saw, unprocessed, not whatever processing and perspective our minds gave it. I got a D in the class, the first time I never got an A for any class on a report card. Before that, I loved doing all kinds of art just for the sake of creating, without thinking about how other people would perceive it, and after that, I have never enjoyed making any art except music.

It was a pivotal moment besides that, because getting the D after trying my hardest and enjoying the process ultimately shifted my locus of control from mostly internal to almost completely external, and I no longer cared about doing well in school.

I love rice and lentils. How do you cook/season your lentils?

What's your issue with PBS?

So Clover. Square cards have one word on each side, and each player gets 4 cards randomly arranged in a 2x2 grid on a clover-shaped board. You have to take the two words from each side of the grid and come up with a single word that you think the other people will be able to use to discern how your cards were arranged, when they've been mixed up. If they guess wrong the first time, you take off the cards they got wrong and leave the ones they got right, and they get one more guess. It's a lot of fun because sometimes you'll get easy combinations like "rain" and "purple" and you can write something like, "prince," for that side which most people over a certain age are going to get immediately, and then a lot of times you'll be scratching your head trying to figure out how to come up with a single word to get people to guess that "cloud" and "phone" go together.

Often you might solve that by just putting a word that is so closely associated with one of the words that the other one is just a throwaway card word you're hoping they'll be able to arrange by thar card's other word exposed on the next side. What makes it harder and mixes it up is, before you shuffle up your four cards after writing your words down, you have to draw another card so the group has 5 to choose from for arranging in the right order, and sometimes that fifth card has words that really throw off your clues.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/329839/so-clover

https://www.amazon.com/Cooperative-Association-Playtime-Repos-Production/dp/B0941TJHXX

Football is a dangerous sport

It's also a list of brand equivalents, which is a helpful tool for shipping. They're all made in the same place and just packaged differently, so comparing unit prices between different stores can give a basic idea of which stores tack on a lot more overhead than others.

I always heard "2 seconds of space" which is a lot more than a few car lengths, to give yourself time to react to both what's in front of you and to the sides, and account for if their brakes perform better than yours. Two seconds of distance is a lot, though, and kind of impractical in traffic.

You think this arrow is pointing to the right, when it is clearly pointing up and to the left? Fascinating.

Iirc that toaster was originally priced at what would be the equivalent of around $250 today. Things are designed cheaply today because that's what people are willing to pay for. It's not just the companies marketing cheaper shit but also the consumers buying it trying to save a few bucks or days of shipping instead of just getting something that lasts. Also, the Sunbeam T20 technical repair manual is detailed and freely available, because appliances at that time were meant to be able to be repaired if they did break. I used it when I bought mine to fix the spring mechanism that wasn't coming up all the way. These days companies don't even provide that information.

Edit: damn it, I just wrote up a review of the T20 before seeing it was already posted. The T20 I got (used, obviously) from the original owner on ebay in 2013 is still going strong 75 years later!

Close to 100% if you follow a normal maintenance schedule. For a place where it's rarely needed, that's once a year. For a place where you get a lot of snow or rain, you inspect, clean, and test it every quarter. If it has sealed bearings, that takes all of 5 minutes.

I'm surprised by the number of homeowners I know who don't routinely inspect their roofs, water heaters and HVAC, or plumbing, or at least pay someone else to do it if they aren't willing to spend a couple hours one time making a checklist and watching a few YouTube videos to learn how to do it themselves. They don't even glance at their roofs from the ground after a big storm to see if there was any damage (I've pointed out missing shingles before). It honestly takes maybe 4 hours a year to do preventative home maintenance, and keeps you from having to spend thousands of dollars doing repairs and replacements.

Atheism is lack of belief in any god existing, not disbelief in the possibility of a god existing. I don't know where you're getting that definition from, as I've never met an atheist who would agree with it? If you ask atheists if they are open to the idea of a god clearly intervening in the universe in any meaningful way, thus proving both their existence and their status as a god, I think the majority would say of course. Many of us would also be disappointed as those gods tend to be selfish, mean, exclusionary, and anti-nature in their treatment and expectations for humans, but we would accept it as reality.

It just seems unlikely to happen given that none seem to have done so yet. If you want to speak of a god in terms of a "spirit of the universe" or similar nebulous impersonal, non-intervening concept, that is hardly different from just believing in the teapot or unicorn, in that it will have zero influence on your life and you may as well not even concern yourself with beliefs at all. Which, coincidentally, is how most "believers" live their lives anyway - without regard to any of the supposed commandments their gods have instituted. It's like they only believe in the idea of belief as a virtue unto itself, not the actual beliefs. And thank goodness they only go that far!

Much more likely, even. RIP Bertrand

That's a fundamental misunderstanding of what agnosticism and atheism even are. Agnosticism is a belief in knowability, and most atheists are agnostic - they make no claim to have certain knowledge about whether gods exist. They mainly acknowledge there is no reasonable evidence to believe in any gods as presented. Many theists I have known are gnostic, as they claim to have definite knowledge that their god exists. Atheism is just a position on whether gods exist. Gnostic atheism is as dishonest as gnostic theism, but then, I have never met a gnostic atheist. I have met many agnostic theists, which is why they are tolerable to be around. They don't make any claims to special revelation.

Fascinating, I hope to see more research on this in the future

...because person has hoarded over 2,000 times what multiple people earn during their lifetimes and continues to hoard more and more...because person takes personal visits in their private plane that cause more pollution than 500 average people in the same wealthy country, who are also polluting too much. She's a better person than Musk by a mile, but she should still be shit on for her bad behaviors. As should all of us when we're wasteful

Why stop there? If you know someone who does any of those things and you're not actively standing in front of their Tesla, blocking their satellite, or preventing them from going to work, you're supporting this.

If you survive hypothermia or high altitude exposure due to medical knowledge obtained in Holocaust experiments, you're a Nazi supporter.

If you're a diabetic who uses insulin, you support animal cruelty/experimentation.

If you don't spend every thought and action on how to stop the genocide in Palestine, you support it. Also, the ongoing genocides in Sudan and Myanmar.

Where exactly is this arbitrary metric of culpability for someone else's actions?

It's a scary forest with many dangers

Is there a term for a society that has all the wealth, technology, industrial knowledge, and manpower readily at hand to be a utopia and despite that, leans hard into dystopia?