Or, y’know, get tested. That was something I always did with significant others before we stopped using barriers (I’m sterile, so pregnancy was never an issue). Anyone that’s not willing to get tested and share results–and I don’t mean verbally, “no, see, I’m totally clean, trust me bro”–isn’t someone you should be having sex with.

…But that’s probably a lot harder for kids to do. I don’t think that a 16yo can walk into a PP and get tested without parental supervision.

Batteries are quite expensive. Lead-acid batteries are readily available, but don’t really work well for powering a house on a regular basis, because they don’t have a very long life cycle. LiON batteries work very well, but they’re fire hazards. Even worse, if you live in an area where you get freezing temperatures, they must be kept inside, because they can’t be allowed to freeze if you’re cycling them. LiFePO4 is the current best option. If you don’t charge them above 80, 85%, and never discharge below 20%, you should have a nearly infinite lifespan. But that means that for every 30kWh of power you use, you want 50kWh of battery. And currently LiFePO4 battery banks run approx. $1000/kWh (+/- depending on band). If you heat your home with electricity, and you live in e.g. North Dakota, you’re going to want more like 200kWh of batteries, because even high efficiency heat pumps can suck a lot of power when it’s -20F.

I’m currently working on getting a 17.7kW system approved by the local utility. It looks like I’ll need to step down what I’m feeding into the grid, because the line capacity out where I live is only 10kW, and they will only approve 75% of the line capacity for grid-tied systems.

I have priced out gym equipment, because I live 100 miles from the nearest “city” (…which is, like 20,000 people).

At $30/mo for a gym membership, it would take me >15 years to pay for a decent, mid-range power rack, Olympic bars, and bench. And that’s not including the weights themselves, which are usually $2-5/pound. A decent elliptical machine from eBay? Another 2 years, plus a year and a half for shipping.

If you’re serious about weights, and not independently wealthy, it almost always makes more sense to have a gym membership.

I wouldn’t call it a satire; it’s more a thought exercise on how to make galactic colonization economically viable. The cost involved in setting up a colony that’s tens or hundreds of light years away would be astronomical, and the return on investment would take so long that it’s simply not reasonable under any current economic system. Right now we talk about how it would be hard to colonize Mars, and that’s only about nine months of travel, and not at anything close to relativistic speeds.

Win 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC is what you want. It comes with a grand total of zero drivers, so you’ll need to download them to a USB drive before installing, otherwise you won’t even be able to get online because there’s no driver for the ethernet or WiFi. You can even uninstall Edge! (Which you should definitely do.) I think that massgrave.dev is considered reputable for downloading and activating, which is done by shell scripts. You should be able to turn off pretty much all telemetry on it.

I am 25(M) and never even touched hand of opposite sex

Oh, yeah, I was in the same boat, raised conservative Christian, dating wasn’t allowed until you were 18, and you were supposed to be dating to get married. I was something like 26-ish before I kissed someone for the first time. (…And ended up having sex with them a few hours later; unfortunately, I had such distorted views of relationships that I scared them off.) I’m mildly autistic, have pretty severe ADHD, and yet, I’ve been married this time for eight years. (The first one lasted eleven, but the last five or six were… pretty rough.)

Get some therapy. Work through some strategies for meeting people, and building relationships. The therapy that works is going to depend on you; different people respond better or worse to different treatments.

Sex workers are expensive.

That said, the right sex worker can be an amazing, wonderful experience. You’re not paying just for sex, and maybe not even for sex at all. Moreover, sex workers tend to be very non-judgemental about pretty much everything, as long as you’re clean and non-abusive; they’ve seen just about everything, and can make most things work in one way or another. One that I’ve spoken to said that it was pretty common for clients to have performance anxiety; although a lot of clients think they want sex, what they want is sexual contact with someone, and that’s not exactly the same thing. Sex workers are common and relatively easy to find if you’re a straight male, a gay man, or a lesbian. It will be much harder to find a sex worker if you’re a straight woman.

If it’s all software, that means that you can jailbreak it, just like a phone.

Late reply here.

When I was spec’ing a system for a DIY build, I was at about $60k for a 20kw system, with a 50kWh battery array, not including the actual copper wire to connect to the panel. But the problem you run into there is the bit about burning your house down, or electrocuting yourself, because the voltage gets very high, very fast. Wiring an outlet in your home is pretty simple, running new circuits from a breaker a little harder but still definitely within what a homeowner can reasonably do. But I was looking at things like pouring concrete for piers for a ground mount rack (my roof isn’t adequate, and is partially shaded), trenching to get to the house, using microinverters so that it could be expanded easily, etc., AND trying to be done by 31 Dec. so that I still squeak under the federal tax credit requirements.

And it’s not nearly as easy as you make it seem. Take panels; they’re all going to have slightly different sizes, voltage output, etc., and you need to understand that voltage output when you’re wiring them together. Some of the larger commercial panels (>650W or so) aren’t going to work with microinverters at all. Then you need to consider how many panels you’re going to be wiring in each string, and how you tie those strings together. Running everything in series runs the amperage up sharply, and running everything in parallel runs the voltage up. To make it even better, panel output increases in cold weather, so building a system with inverters and wiring that’s close to the load limit at 50F can easily end up exceeding the load limit if the temperatures drop to -20F. (And goddamn, copper cables for >200A service can get expensive.) Wiring? Well, hopefully your system is actually all solid copper wiring, and not copper-clad aluminum, because at the load limits for copper-clad aluminum it gets a lot hotter than solid copper; too much aluminum wiring in too close proximity can melt the insulation off in a hurry.

And, again, i can not overstate just how easy it is to kill yourself wiring this shit, because the voltages and amperages get REALLY high, really fast. 20kW is an enormous amount of power.

If you’re including all non-experienced shooters

Even if you include only gun owners that think they’re experienced, it’s still easy-ish to be better than average with focused practice. There are a lot of people that think going to the range once every six months and shooting 100 rounds of slow fire makes them good. Meanwhile, the people that are actually good do dryfire drills daily, and shoot thousands of rounds each month.

I’m solidly low-middle when it comes to shooting competitions like local PCSL, local USPSA, Brutality, Gun Run, etc. That probably puts me in the top 5% of gun owners though. (And I absolutely suck at long range shooting; I’ve done a little, but I don’t know my holds, because I’ve had very limited ability to shoot past 100y. I really struggle past 300y without a spotter, and past 500y it’s basically pure luck for me to hit a full-sized steel IPSC target.)

Absolutely. There are certain things that will make it easier–like having very good proprioception/kinesthesia, or perfect vision–but with enough focused time and practice, almost anyone can become a highly proficient shooter. Some people will definitely have an easier time than others, and some abilities in other areas will help more than others. And yes, you absolutely need to practice or else you’ll start losing your ability.

But.

As far as needing to be introduced to shooting early, absolutely not. There are a number of people that have moved to the US in their middle age from other countries (Korea, in particular) with no experience with firearms, taken up shooting, and have become USPSA masters and grand masters, because they understand how to practice.

Depending on what you want to learn, my first suggestion would be to look up NRA classes. Yes, yes, I know, but trust me, the NRA classes are very good for foundational work. You want to start with safety and get very, very familiar with that before moving on, because carelessness with a firearm can kill. From there, you can do something like Project Appleseed to get proficient with rifle marksmanship, or you can take classes with Ben Stoeger and Joel Park for pistol.

Hunting specifically is going to require far, far more than shooting ability; you’re going to need naturalist skills, like being able to see trail sign, land navigation, getting a feel for movement without spooking animals, and so on. For hunting, most of your time will be spent in observation and waiting, with only a single shot at the end of it all. Spending a lot of time outdoors, in the woods or fields, paying attention to animal behavior is your ‘practice’ for hunting.

Aside from all of this, something to consider is that the average shooter is… Pretty bad. Most people that own firearms don’t put in any significant amount of time training. The police are no exception; most cops are not terribly proficient with their weapon, because they only have to qualify annually, and qualification is slow fire at a target 10y away, not a practical shooting course.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the NRA rifle courses; the instructional courses are where the NRA really shines. The NRA as a 501©(4) is great. It’s the NRA-ILA that’s a steaming pile of shit.

The Socialist IRA is… Very dependent on the chapter. Some are fantastic, amazing groups. Some are very cliquish, and you’re going to need to know your theory cold and never, ever voice any contrary opinions in order to get membership. (E.g., if I say that I think that come degree of professional policing is necessary, both because not all criminals are a product of material circumstances, and because ‘community policing’ can be the autobahn to vigilantism and night riders, that would get me thrown out of some chapters.)

There’s also the Liberal Gun Club, which has some pretty decent people in it, but they’re as scattered as the SocialistIRA is.

Operation Blazing Sword lists instructors that are willing to work with LGBTQ+ people; I’m on there for one of the states.

Appleseed events are a great way of learning the basics of rifle shooting over 2 days. Some of the history they teach as fact is highly suspect–it’s more the American myth than American history—but they nominally keep contemporary politics out of it.

FWIW, I’m in the process of starting a grid-tied solar installation. Total cost, without batteries, will be about $70,000. That’s a 17kW system, that should produce an average of 30kWh/day in the winter.

If I had been doing this last year, it would have been sharply less; tariffs and the drive to kill solar has driven costs up, and the end of the solar tax credit on 31 December means that everyone that wants to do it is trying to do it now, which drives up labor costs.

He’s not a psychopath; he’s psychotic. Those are very, very different.

Psychopathy and sociopathy are functionally identical; they’re personality disorders where a person largely lacks the capacity for empathy, and hence remorse. Being psychotic means that you’re experiencing delusions; you may be hearing voices, or having uncontrollable impulses to do things that would be out of character. His behavior, based on what he’s saying, is entirely delusional; he doesn’t even have internally consistent logic in his actions.

this at least has real links to tangible asset worth,

Well, kind of. But the worth of those assets is largely due to perception, rather than real utility value. Like, real estate is stupidly expensive in many places, but it’s expensive because people believe that it’s expensive. When real estate bubble burst, you see the ‘worth’ of that real estate drop sharply. The utility value is having a place to sleep, but it’s often treated as an investment. So you would still see currency value fluctuations. Currency issue by gov’ts largely has worth because the gov’t says that it has worth; it’s not tied to anything. (BTW - tying currency to a tangible asset limits your ability to add currency when necessary. It will tend to lead to depreciation–the value of the currency rising–which is usually a bad thing.)

The other problem is that corporations and banks go bust; if they were issuing currency, that would mean all your money would instantly be worthless.

I guess that I would have thought that you could isolate those individual compounds, and then reproduce them, rather than hoping that you can find a lucky ball of whale puke.

I dunno, I’m pretty sure I’m not their target audience.

For sound reproduction, I prefer my wired Shure SE-315 with sound-isolating ear tips. But Shokz ar much more comfortable for all-day wear.

So, I tried wearing earplugs with my Shokz. Disappointingly, the sound became very, very muffled. I don’t think that it’s true bone conduction, because if it was, then earplugs shouldn’t have had a significant impact on the sound. They’re still nice, just… Not as cool.

Firefly is solidly decent. It’s not great, it’s not terrible. It had real potential, and then got cancelled after 12 (?) episodes. Babylon 5 was arguably a better show overall, but I can see why Firefly still has a solid fandom 20 years later.

Pretty sure that HK-47 called humans meatbags.

It’s already a problem. People are outsourcing their thinking to LLMs, and LLMs aren’t capable of thinking.