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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • If two states disagree, what alternative would you suggest? “Flip a coin and move on” or “Just give in to the other side” are solutions that are likely to be abused: one rogue state can wreck havoc by making unreasonable demands. Going to war over it seems worse than spending millions in court. The courts ARE our inexpensive, fair way of resolving disputes (even if they aren’t as inexpensive as we might like).


  • Interesting. When I have sized a wedding ring (something I have done several times because of a combination of not fitting, and of me losing a ring twice over the past 28 years) I obviously had to work to get the right size. Like you, I chose rounded edges which made it easier for me to get the ring on and off my finger. Originally I had a width of 4 mm, and moving to 3 mm worked much better for me. (My fingers are particularly narrow and long compared to most men’s hands.) But I have never been asked what “height” to use.

    I would speculate that it affects the weight of the ring. (In my experience, too heavy a ring can be a problem. For instance, a heavy ring May vibrate against the steering wheel on long drives and make my fingers sore.) No one can really see the “height”, so why not go with the thinnest that makes the ring still sturdy?







  • Here is my perspective on the answer to your question:

    Our government is not functional. It is not that it doesn’t “want” a healthy work force, but that it isn’t capable of setting any sort of a policy.

    The last time the US made any meaningful change in healthcare policy was under Obama. My impression of what happened is that there was a brief (2 yr) moment when the Presidency, House, and Senate were all controlled by the same party. The Democrats passed “health reform” which was basically the Republican health care reform package from 4 years earlier.

    In the 13 years since then, the only Republican position on health care has been that Obama’s “ACA” law is “bad”. There is literally no suggestion of what else would be better. (I’m not counting the anti-abortion laws as “health care” – they are seen here as a moral issue, not a health care one.) The Democrats’ position has been a mix of “we shouldn’t let the Republicans take us back to something WORSE!” and “the whole system is broken and needs to be replaced”.

    We have two problems. First, our government is structured so that it cannot easily accomplish anything, at least without cooperation between the two opposed parties. Secondly, one of the two parties is insane and wants to destroy the government (and has enough electoral support to win almost half the time).





  • I like the way you express this. “Cis / Trans” isn’t about your gender, it’s about whether your gender has CHANGED. (Although it may not be your GENDER that changed, but what people THOUGHT your gender was.)

    In a similar way, I (a cis male) usually call myself “straight”, but that’s not really accurate. I don’t feel like I’m attracted to whatever gender is different from mine (which happens to be women); I feel like I am attracted to women (which happens to be the gender that’s different from mine).

    Putting it differently, if some magical spell were to transform me into a woman, I don’t imagine that I would then be attracted to men, I imagine that I would be attracted to women. So instead of calling myself “straight”, I should probably be saying that I am “gynosexual” (attracted to women).