TNG has young fans and you can have enough old farts like me around to populate a TNG forum while the whole is still mostly younger.

It skews young, and young skews left.

Now if only young voted…

The larger the organization, the larger their resources, but also usually the greater their complexity and legacy burdens. Large organizations also move slowly. All of this can delay things long after we might think they ought to have happened.

While we’re making soup, let’s base the entire temperature scale on water, too.

Unenforced is a little different than unenforceable.

Society is unfortunately still functioning where I live.

I once plucked up my courage to ask a girl if she would like to go see a particular show with me the following night. She said “I would, but I am already doing something tomorrow.”

I was totally unprepared for this answer and just heard “no.” She was probably a little surprised to be asked out suddenly, and didn’t take the initiative to suggest another day.

We didn’t go out. That was that. Huge mistake by me. So my advice is: be open to complications in her answer. And listen closely. If she says “I have plans.” that’s a polite decline. If she literally says “I would like to go, but I have plans,” that’s quite different.

It’s hard to hear the differences and react smoothly if you’re nervous about asking, like I was. Best of luck!

I am highly expressive and have little filter. I think my upbringing allowed this or even encouraged it. The meta message in every movie I ever watched as a kid was “if you just look deep inside yourself and bring out the essence of what’s there, you can do / win / be anything!” I’m also male, and my family laughed a lot and yelled a lot and angered easily and forgave easily. As a result, I’m quite outspoken and some find me bombastic or overbearing.

It’s quite hard to put this genie back in the bottle once you’re an adult. If you’re like this and wondering how other people contain it, the likelihood is that they have been conditioned to contain it their entire lives. In some cases longer than that: In Chinese culture, for example, no one has is permitted to be emotionally demonstrative and this has been the norm for thousands of years. It might even have been selected for genetically over time: outspoken peasants executed, expressive daughters disowned…

I will say this though. As you grow older your vision and hearing get worse and your feelings become less sensitive. I can hold a hot object that my kids can’t even touch with one finger. Emotionally, it’s a bit the same. Reactions come slower, and are not as strong. And the muscles in the face don’t react as much, and the heart is less inclined to engage in a full flameout over something trivial. So it gets easier.

If you have no bicycle safe routes then sadly you should not be biking. Taking it onto the sidewalk not only endangers you in all the ways described in this thread, it also endangers pedestrians. Someone said they wouldn’t care about getting hit by a car coming out of a driveway, because that’s slower than a car on the street. Fine. But if I step out from my the huge bush my neighbor keeps on the boundary of our driveways, onto the sidewalk, and you crash your bike into me I’m going to feed it to you.

Years ago I worked at a bike repair camp in Burning Man. We got people’s bikes working again by the hundreds. The occasional dickbag would try to bring his gas powered scooter or whatever in and we’d send them packing. I remember one guy was like “I’ll just borrow your tools and do it myself” and he got thrown out.

I think you’re talking to some people who, in bad faith, are demanding “proof” when they need to learn how to acknowledge “evidence.” Someone with a fixed attitude will keep moving goalposts and cherry picking outliers until the cows come home, and you need to be able to say: your bias is overwhelming in the gymnastics you perform to avoid the clear evidence. The process of science most often doesn’t produce black and white results. Anti-vaxxers are gonna anti-vax and you can’t “persuade” them.

That said, if you can’t provide 7-8 stories with female protagonists, which are very popular, you’re not even trying. His Dark Materials. Moana. The Fault in Our Stars. The Fablehaven series. Frozen. Labyrinth. Heathers. The Force Awakens. Silo. Mulan. Legend of Korra and the Kyoshi novels. The Sarah Connor Chronicles. 16 Candles. Star Trek Voyager. Anne of Green Gables. Watchmen (2019 series). Jane Eyre. Pippi Longstocking. Captain Marvel. Aliens. Amelie. Arrival. Gravity. Little House on the Prairie. Game of Thrones. Coraline. You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.

If you’re really talking to someone who says “there are no stories with…” then here’s enough to easily force them to change their position to “there are far less stories with…” and at that point they would in fact be correct.

There are lot of such toys on the market. They are electric. But they don’t resemble bikes in any way. I get the idea that they are mistaken for e-bikes when people ride them on our mixed use trails which are clearly marked for pedestrians and bikes only, not motor vehicles. People think anything electric is allowed. They are driving shit the same weight as a 125cc motorcycle in between pedestrians. And guess what? These vehicles go really fast so they are more dangerous than anything else on the trail, and they don’t mix into traffic well. The fools riding them are constantly weaving through passing everyone so they can GO FAST! WANNA GO FAST!

My city has amazing bike infrastructure: mixed use trails with no cars, bike lanes on all streets, tunnels and bridges over major thoroughfares (really it’s pretty insanely good and yes it’s in the US of fucking A).

People still ride on the sidewalks like morons. They ride the wrong direction in the bike lanes.

Bike infrastructure is essential but also not totally sufficient. You need a significant enough number of people using them that there is a culture for it and tribal sharing of knowledge around it.

You are less safe for this. You think otherwise, but you’re wrong. Sidewalk. Side. Walk.

I own an ebike and I use it on the mixed use trails in my city. Mostly I have it because I often pull my kids on a trailer bike and we have hills in town.

I fear that my riding on these trails will soon be banned because people are out there driving stupidly fast on big knobby-tired motorcycles masquerading as “e-bikes.”

There are tons of Karens pushing strollers on these trails and any election now they’re going to ban my bike.

I hate cyclists that masquerade as pedestrians. It’s less safe for them and it’s less safe for everyone. Get your ass out into traffic and learn to take up some space. Ride defensively. Get yourself a rear view mirror. Pick the most bike friendly route. For fucks sake.

JS is the web now. Been going this direction for quite some time.

Did you even read the OP? A VPN that has real customers but is set up by a scammer can be doing anything on your computer. You install their client. It could be a key logger for all you know.

And not all services use end to end encryption so yes there is still the potential to listen to http traffic and extract data from it, especially as the VPN client.

Why is “governments” the boogeyman that comes to mind? Scammers and thieves would have much more interest in your everyday consumer internet usage.

Just teach her about gravity. Dont feel bad - for a lot of people it’s not the first priority.

When half of the country will

Y’all deserve

Wow that was a quick progression from “half” to “all.” I deserve this because Republicants are insane fucks? Gee thanks. Not that I care whether you care, particularly.