How much of that is still a reaction to their upbringing though?

Say someone is raised in an abusive situation, and because of that they decide to be nothing like their parents when they grow up and become the epitome of a loving, nurturing parent, or maybe decide to not have kids at all to make sure they break the cycle.

Would that same person make those same choices if they were raised in a more “normal” household?

We can’t really know for sure, but I suspect in a lot of cases the answer would be no.

And of course there’s all kinds of little butterfly effects.

For example, I’ve known one of my best friends since preschool. We attended the same public school from kindergarten through graduation, but after pre school I never had a class with him again until 10th grade. If my parents had decided to send me to a different preschool, it’s very likely I’d have a different best friend, and who knows how that might have affected my life?

Or later in life, when my grandfather was no longer able to drive, my parents ended up with his truck, they could have sold it but instead they held onto it and when I started driving it sort of unofficially became “my” car that I used to commute to community college. If they hadn’t kept that truck, or just didn’t let me use it, I probably would have had to take the bus and would have had to arrange my class schedule differently and never sat next to a guy in a history class who would eventually introduce me to the woman who is now my wife.

So those two little decisions made in my upbringing had big effects on the trajectory of my life. I’m quite happy with where I’ve ended up, but I had no say in either case, so I think you could definitely argue that I’m a “prisoner” to those decisions they made. I’ll never know what twists and turns my life might have taken if they’d chosen differently. Maybe there’s an alternate timeline where my best friend from a different preschool convinced me to buy a bunch of Bitcoin in 2009 and I could be a retired multimillionaire right now.

Richard Attenborough

Is it actually a dedicated gay nudist beach, or is it a nude beach that the gay community frequents?

There’s a nude beach not too far from me, and it’s pretty well-known that the one end of the beach is the “gay” end. There’s no official demarcation, it’s just a regular public beach where nudity happens to be allowed, and the one end of it is where the gay people tend to congregate, if you’re not already in the loop about the local nudist community, you’d have no real way of knowing that until you found yourself there and maybe noticed a lot of rainbow flags and same-sex couples holding hands or something.

But that end of the beach does also sometimes get a bit raunchy, which isn’t really legal though usually police turn a blind eye to it as long as they stay down that end, it wouldn’t bother me too much personally if I stumbled onto it without knowing, but it probably would a lot of other people, and I’d still generally consider it trashy and inappropriate at best.

If you were actually at some sort of private gay club where public sex is allowed, all good, but I feel like you probably wouldn’t be questioning and trying to justify it if that was the case.

Not trying to be contrary, but I’ve gone down this rabbit hole a lot over the years

As far as the donation goes, the argument I keep running up against is usually that they want me to “have something to unwrap” that isn’t just cash or a gift card (no matter how many times I tell them that I don’t care about that) I feel like a little “a donation has been made in your name” note would probably feel like even less of a present to them

maybe point out that it is tax deductible.

Unfortunately I don’t think any of my family are itemizing their deductions.

And as far as vouchers and gift cards go, I hate those things enough that in retrospect they probably should have been point 10. I never remember to use them, I have probably over $200 in various gift cards sitting around in my house right now that I’ll probably never think to grab when I’m running out to the store or making an order online. And I hate being forced to shop at specific places. And of course the amount always ends up not being exactly what I need, so either I’m left with like $2.37 left on a card that I’m really never going to bother using, or I still have to pay something out of pocket in which case I’d really rather I be able to shop around to get the best deal possible but can’t if I want to use the gift card.

Cash would be great, but again they want to give me something besides cash or a gift card.

And as far as personal vouchers go, my home/family life is mercifully pretty harmonious. Except for Christmas I don’t have many complaints, I see everyone pretty much exactly as much as I want to, get to do the things I enjoy doing, etc… About the only thing I would want there is a “get out of Christmas free card” which feels like a weird Christmas present.

And we’re sort of the cooks in the family, so I am the source of good bread and cookies and such, and I don’t really go through a lot of snack foods. I just recently threw out a bunch of candies and such from last Christmas to make room for what I surely have incoming this year, and my soap and such needs are pretty minimal, my preferred brand comes in gallon jugs that lasts me a good long time, and other consumables tend to last me a long time and I never seem to run low around the holidays, nor do I have the storage space to really stockpile a bunch of extras.

And my family is already really good at moving around stuff we’re not using, my brother in law (sisters husband) was kind of astonished at how often we end up moving furniture from one relatives house to another and handing off random things to people who can use them. We could maybe save some of that for Christmas, but then it becomes a problem of “where do we store this second couch we bought in August until we can give the old one away in December”

And handmade stuff I don’t need is still stuff I don’t need.

1. Deep down I’m still an edgy militant atheist, and really want nothing to do with religious celebrations.

2. The only things I really want are things I’m not realistically going to be gifted. No one’s going to buy and install a new heater/windows/deck for me for Christmas, or pay down my credit card, etc. I have too much junk already, I have all the clothes I need, I don’t really need more snacks in the house, and I’m pretty much set up with everything I need/want for my hobbies. I don’t need gifts. Inevitably I’m going to get a bunch of junk I don’t need or want, and I’m gonna take it straight home and throw it out or donate it or otherwise I’m going to spend the next eternity shuffling around my house because I don’t have anywhere to put it.

3. I’m probably a bit autistic or maybe just a bit dead inside, so even on the rare occasion I get a gift I’m really excited about I don’t really have much of a reaction to it, which I feel is disappointing to the people giving it to me.

4. I really hate decorating and then having to take it all down a month or so later, having to haul all this crap down from the attic and then back up again is a real drag. It’s part of the reason I get a real tree, it’s easier to just strap it back onto my roof and haul it to my friend’s house to burn in their fire pit (which is very cathartic) than to try to wrestle it back up the ladder. My wife likes it, so I suffer through it, I just wish she’d do more of the work.

5. I don’t want to spend money. I have things I want to save for and dropping a couple hundred bucks on presents isn’t helping that. I don’t mind getting people gifts if it’s something I think they really need or wound like, but thats usually not why I’m buying them stuff for Christmas, I’m getting them stuff because I feel obligated to get them something.

6. Family gatherings suck. As far as families go mine isn’t too bad, I’d even say I kind of like most of them, but getting all of them in the room together and having to spend most of the day with them is too much. There’s too many people, it’s too loud, and while they’re generally all good people, I don’t really have enough in common with most of them to make it worth the aggravation, they’re best enjoyed in small doses. My wife’s family is smaller and quieter, which would be great, except they want the gathering to go on all day, my wife is bringing stuff over to make breakfast and it sounds like they plan to keep things going until at least dinner, so thats probably gonna be a 12+ hour ordeal when you figure in the time it takes to go over the river and through the woods to grandmothers house. Also, most of our family just aren’t great cooks, and even if they were there are some picky eaters in the family, so family meals are pretty lackluster. I think my wife’s family’s dinner plans are a stouffers lasagna. Luckily I have to work this year so I have a good excuse not to go.

7. Christmas music can be good, but not the stuff that’s been piped into every single fucking store I’ve had to go to for the last month, and I’m sick of it.

8. This is mostly just a me-problem, but I have way too much shit going on this time of year. My anniversary is in November, then thanksgiving which we usually do with my father in law who’s about an hour away, my wife’s birthday, my mom’s birthday, christmas even which is usually with my family, usually about 45 minutes away depending on who’s hosting, Christmas day is usually with my mother in law about an hour away, and then after that I usually host a new years eve party and between work and holiday obligations it’s kind of crazy trying to get my house ready for that.

9. I work in 911 dispatch, we always get some really crazy/sad calls around this time of year. I deal with it just fine personally, but it doesn’t exactly put me in a holly jolly mood.

10. I don’t know, I made it this far and just kind of wanted to leave it on a nice round number I guess… Maybe I find tinsel distracting?

Occasional nudist/naturist here

Depends a bit on the beach you’re at, but generally yeah, that’s pretty inappropriate and would get you thrown out of or even arrested at any of the places I go to. Nudism isn’t about sex, it’s just about not wearing clothes, there are people with kids who enjoy nudism as a family, etc.

The resort I normally go to has a very lively swinger community, sometimes it almost seems like my wife and I are the only couple there not part of the lifestyle, but even still any sort of sexual activity stays out of the open, you go back to your room/tent/RV for that.

There are definitely some places that will turn more of a blind eye to it, but in general unless you’re specifically at some sort of a lifestyle resort where that sort of thing is officially condoned you shouldn’t be doing it in the open.

Personally, I wouldn’t be too bothered by it, I’d think it’s trashy as fuck and would judge you pretty harshly for it but it wouldn’t ruin my day. I can’t speak for everyone else in the nudist community though, and if you search around you can find a lot of horror stories of someone finally convincing their friend to try out nudism only to have the bad luck of that friend immediately encountering some creep or someone having sex out in the open and being immediately turned off by the experience never wanting to try it again

It’s funny that you specifically mentioned the '60s, because back then they were pretty routinely administering the oral polio vaccine on a sugar cube for school children

That’s how my dad got it back then

It’s possible I missed it, but I didn’t see where it said how they came up with this strain of yeast. I was kind of assuming they used CRISPR or some other kind of gene editing to make it.

Regardless of if it was edited or selective breeding and random mutation, I do share those same concerns about how fast it might mutate and lose its effectiveness.

As far as it mutating into something harmful, sure it’s a possibility, but the same possibility technically exists with any strain of yeast out there in the world, untold millions of generations of yeast have lived, mutated, reproduced, and died in breweries, bakeries, and vineyards since humans first started brewing beer and baking bread, and it hasn’t gone horribly wrong yet. It’s certainly worth being cautious about, and I’m certainly no geneticist to make an educated statement about it, but I suspect it’s probably a pretty low likelihood.

I’m kind of wondering if the plan here isn’t to goad trump into retaliating by blurting out where our own missiles are pointed at.

They threw some obvious ones out there like the Pentagon (duh of course they have missiles pointed there)

And then padded out the list with some defunct sites to make the list longer because someone like Trump is going to want to one-up them by listing at least that many of our targets. Russia probably doesn’t actually have missiles aimed at most of those places, but this way they don’t actually have to give up any of their actual targets.

And trump will probably take the bait to beef up missile defences around those defunct sites, wasting money, time, manpower, and resources that could be better used anywhere else.

There’s a lot of questions to be answered here but I feel like this could potentially be a pretty cool thing

He’s created a strain of yeast that seems like it could function as an oral vaccine

You could just filter off the beer and eat the yeast, or maybe put it into pills or something, or purify it into a normal injectable vaccine

But there’s a lot of people out there who are skeptical of pills and afraid of needles, or who just won’t want to eat powdered yeast

But a lot of those same people will happily drink a beer.

It could also be a way towards sort of decentralizing vaccine production. Imagine he starts selling little packets of dry vaccine yeast for people to brew beer with. Yeast is pretty forgiving in its storage requirements, keep it in its little sealed envelope and keep it reasonably dry, and it should be good for a couple years. You can ship that around the world without much fuss.

And people all over the world know how to brew beer. Get that packet of yeast into the local hooch-maker’s hands anywhere in the world, and they can turn it into a bunch of 1-pint vaccine doses in a week or two. No particularly special equipment or distribution networks needed, and vaccine distribution becomes as easy as hosting a kegger.

And if they’re able to reclaim some of that yeast to brew another batch, you’ve potentially even set them up for long-term vaccine beer production.

You might also be better able to convince people who might otherwise be skeptical about taking a traditional vaccine to just drink a beer. It’s not something scary like a needle, or weird and unnatural like a pill, it’s “just” a beer.

And you can focus your efforts a bit more on who you need to convince about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. You don’t need to convince a whole village to trust vaccines, you just need to convince the local brewer that the people already trust, and then you can piggyback off that existing trust.

Hell, I’m pro vaccine, but I know I’d probably be a little more proactive about getting mine if it meant I got to go have a couple beers.

Again, there’s a lot of questions that need to be answered, not the least of which are the basic safety and effectiveness of this

There’s also informed consent, making sure that the people drinking the beer understand that the beer is a bit more than just a beer, and the risks of alcohol (although if this is an effective delivery system, I think it’s likely that those risks are well-outweighed by the benefits of vaccines)

I definitely think it’s something worth exploring.

New York has one of, if not the largest steam systems like that. A pretty significant chunk of Manhattan is hooked up to it.

Although it should be pointed out that those systems aren’t without their own risks, there have been a handful of pretty bad explosions and such caused by that steam system. Not saying to knock it, any system where you’re trying to distribute a large amount of energy has the potential for some catastrophic accidents to happen, it’s all about weighing the relative pros and cons.

They’re also pretty common on a smaller scale for college campuses, industrial complexes, etc. places with a lot of different outbuildings and such, it can be easier/cheaper/more efficient to have one central boiler room/house and pipe steam around than it is to have heaters in ever building.

Also, bit of a tangent, but many moons ago my dad was a pipefitter/steamfitter, and worked with a lot of steam systems, and from what he’s told me about those days it sounded like absolute hell having to go into cramped service tunnels around searing hot steam pipes, all kinds of dust and asbestos everywhere, rats, high humidity, etc. that was probably almost 50 years ago, but I suspect things probably haven’t improved all that much since then, so kudos to the people who are willing to put up with all of that.

Married 7 years, wouldn’t trade it for the world

That said, being single is easier/less complicated.

Marriage is all about compromise, it’s basically impossible that you’re going to 100% agree on absolutely everything with your spouse, and you’re both flawed humans odds are once in a while you’re gonna do something that pisses each other off, you’re going to have to occasionally put your own stuff on the back burner to help with theirs etc.

And that’s hard for a lot of people.

And arguably might be even harder for a lot of men with toxic masculinity, societal expectations, gender roles, etc. not gonna pick that apart too much right now.

Also, in a lot of cases, it may be worth not taking things too seriously, everyone’s got a different sense of humor, and jokes don’t always land the right way. My wife and I pretty regularly joke about wanting a divorce, but it is absolutely 100% a divorce. I usually get threatened with it over making a stupid pun or dad joke, for example, hardly serious grounds for a divorce.

It was around 2016, I was about 25, and I went camping with some friends for a few days.

Up until that point, I felt like I had managed to stay relatively “with-it”

But we had little to no Internet access for a few days, because that’s how camping works.

I came back and dat boi was all over the internet.

I had no idea what was going on with that meme, it never quite clicked for me

And from there it was all downhill, more and more new memes just stopped making sense to me.

Also, funny story, I’m back at work tonight, and had an off duty officer calling in a reckless driver

Wanted to keep following them

Crossed over the border of 3 different towns

And no officers available anywhere near where they were

It’s like he had some kind of reckless driver bingo card he was trying to fill out

Not exactly the soundtrack, it was fine, but nothing special and overall forgettable

But I want to give a small shout-out to Morbius for having really good sound mixing. I definitely expected it to be a “whispers and explosions” kind of movie where you couldn’t hear the conversations, and action scenes blew your eardrums out, and the background music was all over the place

But no, everything was at a reasonable volume, I could hear everything crystal clear.

There was just nothing worth hearing unfortunately.

This varies by state, but where I am if no one’s hurt and the cars are driveable, it’s considered a “non-reportable accident”

Generally speaking, we’ll still send cops to take a report if you really want one but it’s not really necessary for anything. Mostly it’s only needed if you’re it a company vehicle or something and your employer wants it for your file or something.

Otherwise, you just exchange info and let your insurance companies sort it out, the police don’t really have anything else to do with it at that point.

I believe some areas and departments have an online form you can fill out to generate a crash report.

If the police are very busy, they may tell you to just exchange info, do the online report, or go to the station later to file one, otherwise you might have to sit out on the side of the road for sometimes several hours waiting for an officer while they deal with higher priority incidents.

If there are injuries, or if the cars aren’t driveable, that does require a police report and will have a higher priority response because of it.

Again, that varies a lot from one state to another, I’m only speaking about the situation where I work.

I work a bit of a weird schedule

I do 12 hour shifts on a 2-2-3 rotation

So week 1 I work Monday, Tuesday, and Friday-Sunday

Then Week 2 I only work Wednesday and Thursday

Technically for payroll purposes I think technically that Sunday I work is part of week, but that’s a stupid way to think about it day-to-day

So basically one week I work 5 days, and the next week 2

Or if you’re a payroll bean counter, 4 and 3

So on average 3½ days a week, or basically a 4 day work week.

And I really like it despite the fact that I actually work slightly more hours than someone with a normal 40 hour work week.

I never have to work more than 3 days in a row without a 2 day break

I have days off during the week to squeeze appointments and such in

Sure I have to work every other weekend, but every other weekend is basically a free 3 day weekend.

And if you plan your vacations and such carefully you can get a whole week but only need to take 2 days off. That gets a little funny because our PTO is mostly based around 8 hour days since most people here have a normal workweek and they dont change it for those of us who work 12s, it mostly averages out, especially since we work less days overall, but it’s not exact and I’m usually left with a handful of hours left over that don’t add up to a full shift at the end of the year. A lot of it can carry over year-to-year though, so not a huge deal.

This also all happened less than 1/4 mile from a police station

It’s also worth considering that most of the time there’s usually not a whole lot of officers just loitering around the police station, most of them are out on patrol somewhere else in their town.

They might have someone on desk duty, but generally they’re kind of needed there in case someone walks in, or they’re handling dispatch duties, paperwork, etc. or may be injured and on light duty so really can’t be out responding to incidents.

In my county most of the time the people in the station are just office staff and not cops at all.

They may be in and out of the station a few times during the day, but often that’s because they’re doing something there, like dropping off evidence of meeting with a complainant where they can’t exactly drop everything to go respond to another call unless it’s a big priority.

One time coming back from work late at night there was a car stopped in the road about 2 houses down from my house. There was a couple arguing, one of them standing outside the cars the other one inside.

They were yelling and making a bit of a ruckus, but nothing that was exactly going to wake up the neighbors (although that may say more about how few fucks anyone in that neighborhood gave than about how loud they were being)

And honestly I would have been happy to leave them to it, even though it was like 11pm, except that they were blocking the road and I wanted to go to bed.

They were oblivious to me sitting behind them, flashing my high beams, I may have even honked at them, it’s been probably 15+ years so I can’t remember for certain.

So I called 911, gave them the details, turned around and went around the block to get home.

Sat on my porch for a few minutes watching the show to make sure it didn’t escalate (didn’t really think it was going to, my neighborhood was pretty chill overall, we just had a few loudmouths who didn’t know how to shut up) until the cops arrived, then I went in and went to bed. Don’t know what happened from there, I assume the cops basically just told them to shut up and go home.

If they just pulled over they could have kept arguing all night for all I cared. I would’ve slept through it.

Yeah that’s kind of the goal. At my dispatch center we have this big tacky sign by one of our entrances “The calm voice in the night”

To which I always kind of add in my head “asking you to please step outside and talk to the officer knocking at your door”

To get to your main question, my first time calling 911 was for my parked vehicle (well technically my dad’s vehicle, I was about 18, still living at home and using my parents cars since they had 3) getting hit and ran at my job (different job)

Nothing too special there. I didn’t see it but a couple other people did. It was a work truck that did it, and they were able to get the company name for me. Gave them the location, description of the truck, and waited around for an officer to come take a report. I take a good handful of calls like that every single day now.

Parents still have that vehicle too. 1993 Ford ranger, just recently rolled over 100k miles, I’m proud to have been driving it when it happened, had to borrow it to move some stuff and the timing worked out. I love that truck.

The other guy of course denied everything, and there wasn’t really any conclusive evidence that pinned it to a specific person or vehicle for that company, so nothing much came of it, and all the damage was a broken tail light, not really worth making an insurance claim over or making much of a fuss about. Another guy I worked with worked part time for a mechanic and hooked me up with a good deal on a new tail light assembly. Swapped it out right there in the parking lot of the pizza shop I worked at one night.

I did chime in with some thoughts and rants on some of the other replies here in case you haven’t seen them.