I wonder how the built-in Google and Apple IMEs compare.

I think Black English has been a major contributor towards towards mainstreaming "y'all" outside of the South. The rise of black stories being told on television and through film, plus the rise of hip hop/rap as a mainstream genre of music, has helped normalize certain phrases that used to only be associated with either the South or with black vernacular.

That's basically what Arlington National Cemetery is. The union government seized the land of Robert E. Lee, and planning for if they couldn't keep it after the war, decided to turn it into a cemetery to basically make it useless as a farm/estate. Lee's heirs eventually sued and won the land back, but didn't have much use for it, so they sold it back to the government.

BUT I don't tear down people for choosing that life, urban living isn't for everyone.

My contempt for small town and rural America comes from living in it for about 5 years, and then regularly visiting it for another 3 or 4 years. I'm glad I live in a walkable city now. But I don't really criticize people for living that rural life, except in defense to someone else attacking my own lifestyle.

When this song came out, I remembered joking with my Army friends (many of whom are from rural areas, and definitely shared the experiences of getting stationed in rural areas) that it's weird the song! didn't include stuff like "find decent sushi" or "attend an NFL game" or "order pizza after midnight." Or if I'm feeling particularly mean spirited, I'd throw in "find a six figure job" or "hold hands with a white woman in public."

Realistically, though, something like 60% of Americans live in suburban America: close enough to a major city that they can go in for events, but far enough that they can feel that they're isolated from crime or whatever. Nobody actually likes rural living, but some residents of suburban America likes romanticizing rural ideals while still living in an environment that gets the benefit of the economic engine of a nearby city, and the density to support a variety of restaurants and stores and activities. There's an entire subculture of people who own $80,000 trucks and $3,000 guns, who have $200k+ jobs in the city but say their heart is in the country or whatever.

I'm healthy, fit, educated, and kinda rich. I'm also a man.

Do you believe those circumstances grant me with privilege?

The answer is obviously yes, so I'll acknowledge it, rather than try to change the subject to ways in which I'm not privileged. Bringing up ways that white people may not be so privileged doesn't actually address whiteness as privilege.

And privilege isn't even something to feel guilty about. It's just worth acknowledging in a "know thyself" kind of way.

I'm raising kids in a walkable neighborhood.

At this point, my biggest concern is still that they'd get hit by a car. At their current young ages (under 5), they're just not good about understanding where danger comes from when crossing the street or a driveway/alley entrance. Even later in life, I'm wondering how old they'll have to be before I'm comfortable with them riding their bikes on city streets.

At some point, I expect it to pay off (they'll be able to go to hang out with friends and bring themselves to school long before they turn 16). I'm just hoping I'll be able to stay in a walkable neighborhood when they're at those life stages, so that they can take advantage of the good stuff that this neighborhood has to offer.

I've been seeing it in fashion, too, with children's clothes not being as clearly gendered. There's the whole muted colors/beige trend that's easy to make fun of, but looking closer also reveals quite a bit more undermining gender norms in clothes. My daughter wears a lot of dresses (obviously a girly clothing item) with things that are traditionally associated with boys: rocket ships, robots, dinosaurs, heavy construction equipment like dump trucks and excavators, etc. I happen to have a lot of men's clothes that use floral prints or similar design elements, and my toddler son has some of those shirts, too.

I know I have a long road ahead of me on parenting through how to navigate societal gender norms (or even other norms that don't always make sense), but I remain hopeful and optimistic that the environment will be relatively kind and will provide plenty of role models of all types to work with, and draw lessons/examples from.

I'm not going to win every fight, of course, but I'd like to think I'll be able to choose my battles and at least provide some guidance in the right direction, and shield my kids from the worst of the worst examples.

Even if you give your kids both, they still interact with other kids at school who primarily get the gender role toys, and make the gender/interest association. By the time they hit teenage years and are starting to engage with the internet, the learning and interest gap is there.

I'm genuinely hoping that things will be better for my children, through some active management of the environment/exposure that my kids see, especially by fostering and highlighting examples they can learn from. I'm hoping that the early exposure will provide some level of inoculation against the worst of the worst cultural gender norms. There are a number of women engineers and programmers in our family, and my wife has a ton more athletic accolades/credentials than I do. So my daughter associates her soccer league with following in her mom's footsteps, and knows that science and computers are associated with her aunts.

As the dad, I do almost all the cooking in my home, and any activity in the kitchen is associated more with me than with their mom. My daughter has a play kitchen but she also tends to come to me to be the person to show her how to play restaurant (not sure if I'm muddling the message by implicitly leaning into the male stereotype for professional cooking, rather than the female stereotype for at-home cooking).

Of course, there are plenty of examples of people doing things more traditionally associated with their own gender, but I'm hoping that the more chaotic distribution weakens the willingness to internalize stereotypes.

So I am somewhat optimistic, somewhat hopeful, that these Gen Alpha kids will actually have plenty more counterexamples diluting the force and effect of those societal gender norms, compared to what we experienced as Millennials.

I still say "y'all."

Y'all means all.

I'd argue the opposite.

Because you can use metal utensils on stainless, that means that an ultra thin fish spatula is an option when you're cooking something delicate. Silicone or wooden utensils tend to be too thick and clumsy for working with anything delicate.

From what I read the cleanup is just warm water, soap, soft cloth.

What's stopping you from using just warm water, soap, and soft cloth on every other type of pan? If the answer is that it doesn't do a good enough job cleaning those things, then you'll want a pan that can stand up to more aggressive cleaners/scrubbers.

To me, the obvious answer is stainless steel. There are cheap ones and expensive ones, and everything in between. The more expensive ones tend to be constructed with more even surfaces, with better heat transfer (things like an aluminum or copper core), and more durable to regular or even careless use. But even the cheap ones are great.

Stainless advantages over traditional Teflon-based nonstick:

• Metal utensils and scrubbers don't damage it, which means you can use thinner spatulas and scrub more aggressively, or do things like whisk in the pan (helpful for making sauces or gravies)
• No need to worry about maximum temperature (Teflon reacts poorly to high temperatures, degrading quickly and off-gassing fumes that are mildly harmful to humans but deadly toxic for birds)
• Oven-safe (if the handle is oven safe), which is good for certain recipes that are easier to just transfer to the oven (certain sauces or braises)
• Much better thermal conductivity, for faster temperature response to turning the heat up or down.

Stainless advantages over ceramic non-stick:

• Metal utensils and scrubbers OK (ceramic nonstick is more resistant to scratches than traditional nonstick, but the guides still all tell you not to use metal)
• Can withstand higher temperatures (ceramic nonstick isn't as bad as traditional nonstick at high temperatures, but it still loses nonstick properties under high heat, over time).
• More likely to be oven-safe (some ceramic nonstick is oven safe, but you'd have to look and check, and still be mindful of temperature limits)
• Better thermal conductivity

Stainless advantages over cast iron:

• Better thermal conductivity (cast iron actually sucks at this but nobody seems to acknowledge it)
• Easier care, no need to season
• Can handle acids no problem, so things like slow cooking a tomato sauce or deglazing with wine/vinegar/juice are possible without weird dark discoloration in your food.
• Much lighter in weight, so much easier to use when transferring or pouring food, washing the pan, etc.

Stainless advantages over carbon steel (including carbon steel woks):

• Easier care, no need to season
• Can handle acids

Don't get me wrong: I literally own every single type of cookware listed here, and I cook on all of them for different purposes. But the stainless is my workhorse, the default I use on weeknights, because it's easy and mindless and I literally can't mess it up.

EDIT: Wow, can't believe I forgot to actually list the disadvantages of stainless. Main disadvantages:

• Not non-stick. When things stick, it can be a huge pain in the ass, ranging from making your food ugly to actually ruining a dish (for example, if the sticking causes you to destroy the structural integrity of the thing you're cooking, or the the stuck food starts scorching and adding bitter burnt flavors to your food).
• A little bit more effort to clean in typical situations, and a lot more effort to clean when there's food residue stuck to the pan.

I guess it's a two-part observation. The first part does include a qualitative assessment of whether the destruction was "worth it." The second part, though, I don't think includes any moral assessment, just an observation that destruction is happening with or without us, so there's plenty of creation that is possible from merely saving something from destruction, or leveraging an already-gonna-happen destruction to extract some creation out of it.

The weasel word in all this is “overweight (but not obese)”.

I think that's the whole point of the article. Lots of doctors seem to assume that all-cause mortality is correlated with BMI in a straight line, but this article argues that it's actually U-shaped with the minimum in the "overweight" range. It's arguing that these specific people in that overweight but not obese category are getting bad medical advice and treatment because of assumptions derived from observations of the group of people who are overweight or obese.

I don't think of it as "destruction" so much as "consumption." And there's no requirement that the magnitude of each side of the equation be anywhere close to symmetrical.

Buckets of paint are inherently less interesting than a beautiful mural on the wall. Unused bits in flash memory are less interesting than a digitized photograph taking up that storage space.

Basically, creation can be a big positive, on net, because the cost of that creation is often many orders of magnitude less than the value of the thing being created.

Moreover, even with a very generous definition of "destruction," the comparison should still be made to what would've been destroyed anyway, in the absence of the hypothetical creation. When I take a bunch of tomatoes and other vegetables to make a pasta sauce, maybe I have fundamentally changed or even destroyed some plant matter to get there. But if I hadn't made the sauce, what would've happened to those plants anyway? Would the tomatoes have just rotted on the vine? If I spend a day doing something, what did I destroy by letting that day go by?

In a sense, everything boils down to opportunity cost, rather than the framework of destruction. The universe is in a state of destruction all around us, with or without us. We have ways of redirecting that destruction, even in locally creative ways, but even in our absence the destruction would still happen.

Organized sports with formal teams and team jerseys and calendars and refs was fun in my 20's, but I was mainly doing pickup games by my 30's. Now in my 40's, I still do some participation in semi-organized leagues for inherently less serious sports, but it's easy to enforce a "fun first" atmosphere when people are drinking beers while waiting their turn.

That all being said, I still do really enjoy individual, non-competitive sports where you're trying to get your own personal best: weight lifting (whether powerlifting or olympic lifting), running, swimming, biking, etc. I like putting up better numbers than before, in all of those sports, even in a non-competitive environment. Or combinations of numbers (not my fastest 5k ever, but maybe my fastest 5k in the same month that I put up these deadlift numbers, etc.).

The competitive assholes are in youth sports, too, by the way. I think the last time I saw two 40-somethings almost get in a fist fight, they were dads at their daughters' basketball game.

I'm slightly annoyed at my kid's new school. My kid is getting ready for school in a Chinese immersion program, which is great, but the new school wants to gently ramp up with half days with parent participation, with only part of the class signed up for specific half-day blocks. This is annoying because parents, you know, have jobs to go to, and taking 3 hours in the middle of the workday to get the kid to school, stay with them for a half day, and bring them home early is pretty inconvenient. Plus the days my kid isn't participating (with other half classes signed up), I've gotta get childcare coverage.

Can't wait until we get to the normal 8:30am start time with regular after school care.

Why can't we just wirelessly transmit the power, maybe have it hit a collection device that can harness about 4 kwh/m^2/day

My favorite example, in Chinese-speaking families, is just how common it was for people to say "open"/"close" the lights, instead of turning on/off the lights.

Also, in Chinese, "no" is not a complete sentence in answering a yes/no question, so the way one generally says no is to just repeat the verb in the negative: "Are you going to the store?" is answered with "Not going." So sometimes native Chinese speakers repeat the verb when speaking in English, too.

And my personal favorite example, is how the phrase "long time no see" entered the English lexicon: the two leading theories are that it either came from Native American or Chinese speakers. I wouldn't take sides on that debate, but will note that it pretty directly fits a direct translation of the Chinese phrase.

the Allies could have kept fire bombing cities and it would’ve caused far more deaths

This is an underappreciated fact. I grew up in U.S. public schools learning in elementary school about the massive scale of destruction that atomic bombs did bring (and, well, the Cold War was still going at the time). We knew the words Hiroshima and Nagasaki very early on. But it wasn't until I was in college that I learned about the destructive scale of firebombing Japanese cities (and frankly, I learned it from a film class discussing Grave of the Fireflies, not from a history class).

And maybe I'm jaded because I'm a combat veteran who has seen firsthand the toll that an extended period of conventional warfare and insurgency brings on urban areas with millions of residents, but I don't think of nuclear war as really that big a departure from the shittiness of things that are actually within more recent memory. Or maybe that's a misconception I hold that should be corrected, and these anti-nuclear people are right to express concern about cultural attitudes towards nuclear weapons, I don't know.