Comparing US statistics to Dutch ones makes no sense. Their roads are several times more deadly than European ones regardless of vehicle.

Furthermore not all of their states have mandatory helmets (!) whereas over here it’s rare to see someone missing something other than pants. Except scooters, scooter riders are under the impression that they don’t ride a motorcycle and that flip-flops are appropriate apparel.

Then there’s a lot you can do as a motorcyclist to mitigate risk. Riding safely is one (not everyone seems capable of that, there’s quite a spread in riding behaviors, but also an obvious bias in which ones you’ll remember seeing on your commute). A strict no-alcohol policy is another, and not riding at night on weekends. You can also wear extra safety gear such as a high-vis airbag.

Also licensing requirements. Oh and American motorcycles don’t have to be equipped with ABS. They be crazy over there.

The complete lack of thought for obvious disastrous consequences is how you recognize a true Maoist policy.

I welcome or wet-ass bidet future, comrade.

So do Muslims. Jesus is to the Quran and the Book of Mormon what Moses is to the New Testament. A recognized prophet, but not the prophet because god apparently felt the need to send a new one down to earth to clarify a few things.

I don’t personally give a shit as I’m not even remotely religious, but the only reason Mormons pretend to be a Christian sect is because it’s politically convenient to them as a US religious minority to “blend in” better. The more you learn about their beliefs, the more you realize they might be further apart from Christianity than Christianity is from Judaism.

Don’t make the mistake of starting from the “enlightened centrist” hypothesis that everyone’s a little bit right and working backwards to a justification why an absolute moral position is supposedly hypocritical.

This isn’t about my feelings, this is about a right to self-actualization.

And you clearly didn’t understand my point if you are getting hung up on this idea of gender stereotypes. I could be 150 cm with humongous pendulous tits, hair down to my BBL, a miniskirt and a crop-top with my nipples poking through, 30 cm stillettos, Marilyn Monroe’s face, enough makeup to smother a small child, and the brattiest attitude you’ve ever seen in your life. That still would not give anyone the right to be sexist. You’re the one bringing sexism into this like it’s somehow inextricable from the experience of gender.

Fallacies upon fallacies.

The right to self-actualization is not equivalent to hatred nor an enforced social order of arbitrary and repressive rules. You don’t get to pull the “it’s just feelings” card to defend bigotry.

Gender characteristics are not the same thing as stereotypes and either way none of that is inherently sexist. Characteristics just are. The weighted sum of gender characteristics is how we perceive gender outwardly – which is not necessarily correlated to internal perception of gender. Sexism only happens because some people use that outwards perception of gender to make ill judgment and enforce unfair rules. That’s on them, not the person being perceived.

• Being trans isn’t about gender stereotypes. There are plenty of GNC trans people.
• Gender is a social construct and it doesn’t have to be sexist when consented to. No woman owes feminism to shave their head and wear cargo shorts. If gender truly is a choice then how could it be sexist?
• Some people feel strongly man or woman, some feel strongly neither or both, some don’t feel strongly any way. That’s just a fact of life and no amount of social theorizing will invalidate those people’s feelings.

On top of the answers you got there is a problem of semantics. “Feminine” can mean very different things in different contexts once you step even slightly out of the cishet gender binary.

Standard English lacks a concise way to convey the idea of fashion choices reclaimed from “feminine” fashion as its own (usually but not necessarily) male gay thing. We call that “femme” or “effeminate”, but the difference between a cross-dresser and a hairy gay man wearing a crop top and booty shorts is obvious. We call that “femme clothing” because we lack a better word for it, but that archetypal gay man isn’t any less masc for it and probably isn’t any closer to attracting archetypal lesbians or straight men.

Another way semantics betray us is when we call emotionally available/sensitive men “effeminate”. Usually in a misogynistic way, but regardless men who are emotionally sensitive aren’t “feminine”.

At the end of the day “being a man” is a vibe, the sum of countless things that aren’t offset simply because a small part of your gender presentation is borrowed from traditionally female things. And vice-versa, neo-nazis on their gym grind aren’t better men because they put on 100 kg of useless muscle and refuse to shake a woman’s hand.

Another big part of the Great Male Renunciation is that the Enlightenment was a time of revolution and violent rejection of the nobility’s privileges. The nobility whose defining fashion traits were to wear complex, frilly, colorful dresses and heels and wigs.

Muted fashion was a way for the new ruling class of capitalist bourgeois to set themselves apart from that history and to pander to the proletariat. We still see some of that for example with the stark difference between “luxury” brands like Gucci that are considered nouveau-riche and gaudy, and the fashion of billionaires which is “clothes that look like everyday clothes (but probably cost more than some houses)”.

The Enlightenment, fall of the “Ancien Régime”, and Industrial Revolution altogether explain the Great Male Renunciation, however the reasons why flamboyant fashion was pushed on to women (to then be reclaimed by gay men) have everything to do with misogyny.

The idea is theoretically viable, if you’re actually paying for carbon sequestration. You emit X tons of carbon, you sequester X+Y tons of carbon (where Y > 0), that’s a net win.

The problem is that no-one is doing that because it’s several orders of magnitude cheaper to offer carbon credits to “save” forests that no-one was planning on cutting down. You get a clean conscience at a reasonable cost, some middlemen get richer, the planet gets warmer.

Usually it’s because some chucklefuck put SSO in the requirements so now everyone has to suffer so that SSO users get their redirect before being shown a password field.

Sometimes though it’s an absolutely braindead web designer who definitely doesn’t have SSO as a requirement but has no idea what he’s doing and is just doing the mr-bean-cheating-on-a-test.gif and copying their Microsoft login form.

I’ve created the Aro community on blahaj, but I’ve found there’s just not much to talk about.

How do you talk about something you don’t feel or do?

One thing I’d be interested in is research into the causes of aromanticism, but last I checked there’s literally zero academic research that treats it as distinct from asexuality.

I expect a strong link with autism due to the involvement of oxytocin.
Maybe I should run a poll in aro communities to check my theory, but I’m afraid that sample size and bias would make the results meaningless.

Relevant for England but not Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland.

A good metaphor for Brexit I guess.

There are two main points to getting a diagnosis:

1. Access to mental health services and acomodations, which will often require “proof”. Up to you to decide if you need that.
2. Getting “closure” and self-understanding. Which is what most “high functioning” adults are really looking for with a late diagnosis. That does not require your psychiatrist to write anything down though. In your position I’d explicitly ask for that.

TikTok Gave Me Autism: The Politics of Self Diagnosis

I am well aware but any artist that is signed to a large-ish label is unlikely to publish on bandcamp, much less soundcloud. There aren’t 50 ways to pirate mainstream music, it’s either the old-school way or ripping off youtube. Or so a friend told me.

And any artists that do have a bandcamp I would feel bad about downloading their music without paying for it, these guys usually aren’t T-Swift rich…

Which music library can it rip from? Last I checked it couldn’t do spotify’s due to the heavy DRM they use. All the tools you find online either do an audio out rip-and-reencode (lossy though minimally so) or more likely “look up on YouTube Music and download” which is objectively going to yield worse audio quality (though whether that matters for one’s usecase is very dependent on hardware and wetware specifics). The bigger problem with blind YouTube music rips is you’re occasionally going to end up with intros/outros and random diegetic noises from music videos.

Fictional characters also have a bunch of naming rules that real people don’t. Quite importantly, unless you’re GRRM they should not have the same or similar name to another character in your story (i.e. what you’re saying, one name per person and one person per name). Else shit’s just confusing, as knows anyone who tried to learn anything about Elden Ring’s lore.

Names also should match the character’s personality. John’s John because he’s meant to be pathetically average and John is the most average white american name there is. Naming him Bartholomew or Rico would not have worked for that particular character.

I would therefore posit that if John as a fictional character did transition, Jane might be a better fit due to being more common while still being familiar enough not to be confusing. Or perhaps Jess which retains an alliteration but sounds even more “basic” then Jane IMO.

Sweden has some of the cheapest electricity in all of Europe thanks to all that hydro.

This year my final electric bill was ~ 25 c/kWh. Gas was ~ 8c/kWh (both after distribution costs, and funnily enough for electricity I pay amongst other things a fee to subsidize other people’s solar panels’ negative impact on the grid).

Not “comically expensive” but to be cost-effective a heat pump must average a COP of at least 3.1 (which is possible in most climates with a decent enough HP), so it’s not yet a “jump on it first chance you get” kinda deal because it will take many years to recoup the initial investment. And people remember last year’s winter where the electric costs were more than doubled; gas prices tend to fluctuate much less. This makes heat pumps even more of a very long term investment for people who can afford very large surprises in their power bill… Or who have excess PV generation capacity in the winter (that requires a very large house).

Gas is on the way out but all the political sabotage of electricity prices in Europe (nuclear phaseout, asinine financial regulations and fake competition with useless middlemen, misfiring PV legislation meaning PV owners are being subsidized by everyone else, etc.) means it will take a very long time before HP costs drop enough for people flock to replace their existing gas heater with a heat pump.

Ma’am, that is a 33 cl mixture of gas station sludge. It has no syrup, leaves, or apple juice. It is an amalgamation of the industrial output of several laboratories, distilled, mixed, powdered, re-liquefied, and ultimately inexorably joined in an unholy water chalice. God had no hand in the creation of this abhorrence. The fact that this terrible liquid exists proves that God is either impotent to alter His universe or ignorant to the horrors taking place in his kingdom. This prism of water is more than gas station sludge. It is a physical declaration of mankind’s contempt for the natural order. It is hubris manifest.
We also have a higher glucose variety if you would prefer that.

🤓

Carburetors are still the norm on small ICEs (e.g. garden tools), and very common on vehicles that don’t need a license plate. Motorcycles also commonly had them until about 20 years ago, or less depending on the make/region.

Granted car mechanics do not generally care for carburetors unless they specialize in antiques.

The Algorithm has been A Thing long enough to have impacted young adults during their formative years.

At 25 I’m barely old enough that I entered adolescence just as “youtuber” became a career for many people (around 2012ish). The Algorithm has been part of it all my teens though I witnessed it becoming increasingly eldritch throughout and teaching its final untethered form in the second half of the 2010s. Today’s 20 year olds never knew anything else as they were 13 when elsagate was in full swing.

TL;DR how are your knees grandpa?