tried to pm but it says you're not receiving messages. Can you send a link to what this is and how you treat it? thanks in advance and sorry for thread derail

I don't own napkins or use them. I don't seem to need them when I eat. (unless eating barbeque or something, I guess). The kids often do need a significant wipe or wash after eating if they've eaten something even vaguely messy, though. We just clean up at the end of the meal.

I can't imagine a story in which someone crossed illegally into the US from anywhere with peaceful intentions (annoying, intrusive intentions, but peaceful) and was shot on sight being treated as sort of culturally okay because we really didn't want them here and after all we warned them ahead of time and have been shooting people on sight when they cross for years, etc.

Well he's a beautiful baby, congratulations. 7lb 15 oz is nothing to sneeze at! You must be so happy 🙂

I wonder if one could think of these things like this: would the owner, knowing I would do this, still want to sell me the coffee?

Some books I think I spoiled by reading too early (or being required to read too early). I read Fahrenheit 451 I think in like 5th grade? Or 6th, maybe. I didn't love it then, thought it was too scary. Really I don't think it's a children's book, ideally.

All wine tastes virtually the same to me, I bet I'd like two buck chuck. Is it still two bucks, is the question. I assume not ?

Glad you went, good call you! Best wishes for the surgery to go well (and pain to finally resolve).

I would go right on off to the ER, and I say this as someone who doesn't carry standard health insurance (so ER is generally self-pay) and who tries everything in the book and on the internet before going to a doctor.

I could really use some humorous books these days too, if anyone has any more recs for that. I've been on an Agatha Christie and Rosemary Sutcliffe binge, which, combined with the early winter grayness, is not doing my disposition any favors.

Yes to A Walk in the Woods! Laugh out loud funny, although of course you have to be able to overlook the anti-southerner bias, which is painful at times.

Our practical solution has been that DD13's friends call and text her with plans on one of our cellphones (DH and I both have flip phones, which we use when we're travelling or in an area that doesn't have a landline) or on our landline if we aren't using cellphones. She also uses our email. Her friends email her through our email, she responds, all is well. I had access to the family phone as a teenager but I didn't have my own personal phone.

This is what we have and with no plans to change

It only makes sense to do it proportionally if you were going to give her 100% on the project if all completed parts were perfect, even though some parts were incomplete.

I think what people should read is really dependent on the person. Sartor Resartus and Ulysses meant a lot to my DH; I can't even read them, I've tried. They make no sense to me. Every few years I reread through the Earthsea books by UK Le Guin. They are my favorite books. With each child I end up rereading through Harry Potter, the Little House books, Narnia. I read Huck Finn first as an adult, maybe a year ago, and it was a marvellous revelation. It is a book that can only be read the first time once, and it is a very good book that first time. When he (spoiler) tears up the letter and says well I'll just go to hell, then!, and when he's really backed into the last corner and they're going to find out he's not who they think he is but he doesn't know who they think he is, and it turns out they think he's Tom Sawyer - both of those things were immensely satisfying the first time through.

I mean, at some point the capacity of the system is reached, though, right? It could be a lot longer from now, if we innovate to make full use of solar energy and all turn into vegans and develop some breakthrough in water supplies. That makes sense to me. But we can't just keep growing humans forever, unless we're going to set up some serious off-planet situations, which I agree are enough of a pipe dream to not be something you'd want to rely on. We can say sure, the world could handle 100 billion, or 1 trillion, but could it handle 30 trillion? I mean, at some point it's just obvious that growth will have to slow in some way. Or become stagnant. Bluegoat, the reason I don't worry about this per se is because I think the population will implode before we all turn into vegans. The reason I think your newspeople don't put two and two together about saving the environment and growing the economy is because saving the environment without actual personal self-sacrifice feels good and growing the economy feels good and so doing both feels really good. I have discovered that people's need to feel good, especially if it requires sticking their heads in the sand, often trumps doing what they know is right (in particular I've discovered this re: factory farming. Everyone I talk to says, oh yes, factory farming is so terrible! They shouldn't do that to the poor animals! Gestation crates and poultry cages and feedlots and veal and shooting dairy calves in the head and all of it, Very Bad Indeed! but they just can't stop eating cheeseburgers. Not one of them, ever.)

Finally, in re: the OP, which is why I finally clicked on this thread in the first place, if the idea is that your ignorant relatives can't get with the program and believe in your social policies and ideas because they don't go to college and don't listen to the news sources you listen to - that's just the most biased, narrowminded, (gasp! bigoted!) POV I can imagine about people who happen to not agree with you. Lots of educated people don't agree with you either. I'd say the majority of the world's population is probably "bigoted" if by "bigoted" you mean resistant to same-sex unions, the social mixing of races or castes, and encouraging women into traditionally male roles (much less the even more progressive stuff you seemingly have to accept now on the left to avoid being called a bigot). Certainly the majority of the world's population who have ever lived would be considered bigots, right? And yet they built this society, modern science, philosophy, religious institutions, western literature and civilization - and were obviously not idiots who just didn't listen to enough NPR.

Re: the guardian article, I couldn't read through the whole thing as it made my eye twitch (obviously I am well right of center). But I do get super, super annoyed at the idea that women should for some reason vote for democrats because they are women, or that they shouldn't vote for trump because he is a philanderer. Many women I know, including in some ways myself, are single issue voters - or at least, voters who can be swayed in some circumstances but really really care about that issue. For the liberal women I know, the issue is abortion. It's why Kavanaugh's confirmation was crazy, it's why they vote democrat on every ticket, it's the thing that frightens them most about Trump as president. For the conservative women I know (fine, I don't know many, separate of some on this board), the issue is abortion. It's why they voted for Trump if they did, it's why they vote a republican ticket, it's why Trump came to Kansas after Kavanaugh got confirmed and had a rally at which people seemed quite ecstatic. The article frames Democrats as the party most aligned with women's interests, and asks why white women keep voting for republicans. Well, I'd just say that I don't think Democrats are aligned with women's interests. I don't think abortion is in women's interest. I think women do get equal pay for equal work. Also, there's a clear divide between married women and single women, and that makes a lot of sense to me - married women have different concerns than single women.

This makes no sense to me. I believe in staying home with the kids too, I do, but I don't see how you can tell someone they should have given up paid employment so they could get free things from the government. If SKL's dad's income could have supported them alone, then I can see suggesting her mom stay home. But otherwise you're saying she should have purposefully taken money from someone else. I dunno.

Well, I have a theory, Stella. Maybe it's something like these: Western society has been trying to tell people, especially over the last two decades but in some ways for quite some time, things they consider pretty off the wall. For instance, they tell us now that it is not only possible to cut off your body parts, sew others on, decimate your reproductive ability, and take drugs to change your appearance and voice and (to some degree) personality, but that we have to both allow people who want to do this to do it and pretend that it has actually changed them into the something they are not. To some people, esp. on the Right I think, this kind of thing just seems as absolutely insane as a flat earth does. I mean, you're telling me that this person, who is obviously a man - has male genitalia, has an X and a Y, is 6 feet tall, etc. - is now technically a woman because he's cut off his penis and taken drugs to grow breasts? And that I have to not only accept that he's a woman, but be polite about it, and I'm a bad person if I don't accept what (to many people) seems like outright insanity? And lest anyone think I'm picking on transgenderism, or whatever, I think many people on the Right feel this way about more than just that. They see a lot of the leftist social push of the last 20-30 years, esp the last 10-15 years, as being really off the wall. So for some of them (obviously not all, most people on the Right still have their brains), the flat earth thing isn't any crazier than letting someone choose their pronoun. Do they believe it believe it? Some of them do, yes. They don't trust anything they don't feel like trusting from modern science or from society or from what everyone else things, because everyone else thinks things that seem to them like either Very Bad Ideas or just completely nonsensical. They're idiots in the way that Neo-Nazis are idiots - the world is not flat, and the Nazis lost, so why associate with them? But I can see the appeal in both of them.

Fair warning about the spray whipped cream: it fails like 75% of the time. I always get a backup tub just in case. Mini pumpkin pies (from the same website, easy to make gluten free instead) might be good. It's nice to have one thing that everyone else is having.

We got this illness a couple of weeks ago and it was over quickly.

Here's a related thing people seem generally unwilling to discuss: WW3. If you even say WW3 people tend to do a sort of oh, here we go again sigh. But when in the history of humanity have we avoided going to war forever? And when have we been both so centrally dependent (and so vulnerable to collapse) and so technologically capable? We had weapons that could literally wipe out all of humanity decades ago. Do we think governments have not developed anything superior to those since then? That no one is constructing, say, nano-bots, or plagues, or bombs that can set off tsunamis? It sounds like sci-fi, but the bomb sounded like sci-fi in the 20s.

I don't disagree, but do you not think we might achieve colonization of other planets?

I agree with the three possibilities scenario, and with the third possibility, the one being proposed/lamented here, as basically unrealistic. You want humanity as a whole to do something humanity has never done? (that is, willfully stop reproducing and creating and consuming and etc.)? Not going to happen. Even if we in the West decided for some reason to do this, and it would take a massive amount of social control that the West is really not known for to achieve it, there's still all the huge developing nations. China and India and etc. aren't going to just say, oh well, guess you guys got to middle class comfort and security and ease of living first (by using lots of resources), we'll just not bother ever getting there because you guys got to it first and used it all up and so we'll take the fall for it. hahaha no. I am hopeful about innovation; my pessimistic side says massive die-off via war or plague or something else, exacerbated by modern centralization and the dependency of so many on so few for things like food production and energy production and logistic, will just reduce population to a manageable level.