Proprioception is a weird one. If you lay in bed very, very still (or floating in an isolation tank), you very quickly lose the sense of where your limbs are in relation to the rest of you. It’s almost like a form of self-hypnosis; it’s a very strange sensation. My perception is that it only functions well when you are moving.

There’s also the part where steam–under pressure–can be much hotter than boiling water.

True enough. And Trump could very well accelerate that with his economic temper tantrums. Still, I don’t know what currency BRICS would settle on; certainly not the ruble, not after Putin cratered the whole country’s economy. The yuan?

Or gueuze. They tend to be a bit hard to find in the US. Sour Flanders red ales are another good style, and also difficult to find.

IIRC, a proper lambic is made with spontaneous fermentation, which makes each batch slightly different.

So, correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t that also change the way that the arrow is accelerated by the bow? Like, it starts a little slower, and then has increased acceleration until the string returns the the starting position? Whereas a long or recurve bow is going to have the hardest acceleration at the very start, since that’s where the most energy is stored?

And if that’s true, how does that affect the flight of the arrow? I know that with stick bows, the arrow bows as it’s being accelerated, and then wobbles slightly before stabilizing a few feet in front of the bow. Some of that is likely because the arrow has to bend around the bow stave. But do you see less of that with a compound bow?

The US is a unicorn country because the US dollar is the primary currency in the world. If the Euro supplanted the US dollar for that position, then the problems with excessive debt could absolutely happen in the US.

Hmmm. I could support mandatory service, but not necessarily military service. An army of conscripts isn’t a very good army; just look at Russia. OTOH, I think that, in general, a population that has some basic level of training so that they can be called up and quickly activated if the professional military needs more people isn’t a terrible idea. On the other other hand, I think that people being conscripted to do public works and service is a pretty solid idea.

That said, I’d be much, much more supportive of a system where no one had citizenship–and I mean no one–without doing four years of service for their country first, in whatever capacity they were needed and capable of serving, whether that’s some form of military service, or working in soup kitchens. E.g., unless you are willing to work for the country, you should not be able to vote -or- be elected, nor should you have absolute, unfettered free speech. IMO people need to be invested in some way in their country. Look at immigrants that have been naturalized; they’re often far more serious about their citizenship and their responsibilities as citizens than people that were born and raised here. IMO we should aspire to have all citizens be as committed as those that have been naturalized.

EDIT - to be clear, I support a population being actively engaged in the politics of their locality, state, and country. Too many people are disengaged from news and politics, and that’s a terrible thing.

As far as firearms training, my issue is that it’s often used as a way to deny rights. E.g., make training mandatory to get a permit, but make training expensive, inconvenient to get to, at times that conflict with work schedules, etc., in order to discourage people from exercising their right. If training was offered on-demand, was free, and you didn’t need to pass a test in order to be able to use your civil right, then sure. Like, the hunters’ safety classes? You have to take the class, but you don’t have to pass a test in order to be permitted to get a hunting license. (Or, you don’t in my state. I’ve taken the class; most of it is pretty basic if you are already familiar with guns.) Any system that uses testing to determine if you can exercise a civil right will inevitably end up functioning like literacy tests did for voting rights.

In that case, I would recommend using your time machine to go back in time and buying something to protect the floor from the sofa.

Short of sanding the floor down, there’s really not a lot that you can do. The dents and dings aren’t going to pop back out; it’s not like auto repair where you can use a suction cup to pup them back up. Sanding the floor down is expensive; you’re looking at thousands of dollars to have it done by a professional that will do it correctly. Doing it yourself is… not a great idea, unless you are a perfectionist and have a pretty good idea of what you’re doing. Even then, renting the machines–or buying!–and buying the needed sandpaper, CA glue, and poly finish (assuming you want to use poly; I have other finishes that I prefer, but poly is fast and usually non-toxic) may well be more than your deposit.

The argument that you’re going to want to make is that this is expected wear and tear; that might fly with your landlord, it might not. You could make a small-claims case out of it, and you might be able to win that. Or you might not, and then you’d be out your deposit, plus the cost of filing a small-claims case.

The probability is that, as you age, your ability to change you attitudes in order to keep up will slow down to the point where you will seem regressive and problematic to 20yo children when you are 60.

The era that my parents grew up in would seem awful to most people now, but my parents were unaware that there were problems, and they have a hard time seeing a lot of them now.

“For all intensive porpoises” is the one that really annoys me.

They’re dolphins, not porpoises. Fuck, get your cetaceans right.

but this is ultimately voluntary and led by ones conscience.

Voluntary association is one of the defining traits of anarchist collectives though. None are compelled to participate, they do so willingly. The same was true with the early Christian church that existed within the Roman empire.

It is true that we see discrepancies between what Jesus supposedly said, and how the early church was organized. The church was certainly a product of its own time, much like Jesus’ teachings about the position of slaves.

This was Luke writing in Acts

My apologies; it’s been 30-odd years since I believed in a theistic religion, and I misremembered that.

[it] says very little (if anything) about how a state or market ought to behave.

True. Christianity is less concerned with material conditions than with eternal questions. But it seems fairly clear that valuing wealth and power more than spiritual matters is very antithetical to the teachings of Christ or his apostles. Wealth isn’t seen as inherently bad; it depends on what you do with it.

I was raised in a very conservative home, both economically and socially. Even as a young person, it was clear to me that there were some pretty serious discrepancies between what Jesus and his disciples said about wealth, and how my own family and church viewed wealth.

Not particularly. Christianity in particular, if one reads the New Testament strictly, is quite socialist. In one of the Pauline epistles, Paul talks about all of the members of a congregation holding all things in common.

Marx assumes that addressing the material conditions would eliminate religion, and i think he’s only partially correct. Yes, religion eases the pain of injustices now, but socialism can’t address ideas of purpose within the universe, and life after death. Economic theory has nothing to say about whether or not any given deity is real.

OTOH, I’m an atheistic Satanist; I largely oppose theistic religions because I see them used to control people, rather than to comfort or help.

The Lord works in mysterious ways…

Hydrocodone made my eyes itch so badly that I couldn’t keep them open. It took about five or six hours before I could see anything.

Weird. I’ve gotten oxy for a surgery, and it was just meh. Didn’t make me feel tired, didn’t really do a lot for the pain–which wasn’t really that bad–def. didn’t get me high. OTOH, I’m allergic to at least one opiate, so IDK.

The Netherlands, perhaps?

As an American, I would support such a ban. the rest of the world shouldn’t be subjected to American social media.

No.

No.

And also, no.

Long before I was diagnosed as being autistic and having ADHD, I knew that I would be a shitty parent. I’m often wrapped up in my own world and busy doing my own thing, and that doesn’t work very well for relationships, and considerably less well for raising a child.

I have cats, I have a spouse. That’s enough.

It really depends on whether it can be made to meet all the other criteria required for armor. I think that it’s too early to make any good predictions.

I don’t know if this will actually pan out the way that they imply in the title; armor needs to have a lot of different characteristics in order to be practical. As in, resistance to heat and cold, resistance to acids, alkalines, petroleum distillates, salts, UV, and oxygen, and also resist deformation. Multiple materials have displays significant promise for armor, but had a very short lifespan in real-word conditions. For instance, there was a material trademarked as Zylon that was supposed to be better than Kevlar, and it was used extensively by Second Chance (a body armor company); several cops were killed when their armor failed, and the armor failed because of exposure to sweat and ambient heat.

Yeah, this is a super cool development, but remember that everything that comes out at this stage is hype.