If you cut the hood off your jacket, do you have less jacket?

The inner part of your foreskin and glans are a mucous membrane, similar to the inside of your mouth or eyelids, when you remove the foreskin the glass is exposed, dries out, and keratinizes.

The skin of your penis is also supposed to be mobile and slide along the shaft, it’s sort of like a bearing, if a circumcision is done tightly it can’t do that and you may need lube for masturbation or sex that wouldn’t necessarily be needed otherwise.

The frenulum is often removed in circumcision and is one of the most sensitive parts of the penis, so removing that obviously loses some sensitivity

Definitely seems like it minimizes or destroys some normal functioning to me.

I’m maybe not the best person to answer but I think the general idea is that it’s supposed to be an open communication for any licensed person to use and any that anyone is allowed to listen to, and it’s supposed to be used exclusively for non-commercial purposes, and there’s some additional regulations about who can use it and how

If you’re sending encrypted transmissions, no one can tell if you’re using it appropriately or not. You may be transmitting on frequencies your license doesn’t give you permissions to use, you may be using it for commercial purposes, you may not be identifying properly, etc.

Radio frequencies are a somewhat limited resource. There’s only so many frequencies allocated to amateur use or to different commercial uses, etc. If someone’s using amateur frequencies in a way they shouldn’t, they’re tying up those parts of the spectrum so that properly licensed users can’t use them for the purposes they’re reserved for

And if they’re encrypted you can’t really differentiate the lawful from the unlawful users making it harder to police.

it would need a majority vote to even get started

Which seems to imply that the absolute first step is for there to be a vote.

So I think OP’s question is really- “Even though it’s not going to go anywhere, why can’t democrats just keep asking for that initial vote for different chargers to clog up the house?”

I was asked to officiate my friend’s wedding a few months back, I’m no writer, and I wanted to do a bit better than just a generic wedding ceremony for them

So I fired up chatgpt, told it I needed a script for a wedding ceremony, described some of the things I wanted to mention, some of the things they requested, and it spit out a pretty damn good wedding ceremony. I gave it a little once over and tweaked a little bit of what it gave me but 99% of it was pretty much just straight chatgpt. I got a lot of compliments on it.

I think that’s sort of the use case. For those of us who aren’t professional writers and public speakers, who have the general idea of what we need to say for a speech or presentation but can’t quite string the words together in a polished way.

Here’s pretty much what it spit out (Their wedding was in a cave)

Cell Phone Reminder

Officiant: Before we begin, I’d like to kindly remind everyone to silence your phones and put them away for the ceremony. Groom and Bride want this moment to be shared in person, free from distractions, so let’s focus on the love and beauty of this moment.

Giving Away the Bride

And before we move forward, we have a special moment. Tradition asks: Who gives this woman to be married to this man?

[Response from Bride’s dad]

Thank you.

Greeting

Welcome, everyone. We find ourselves here in this remarkable setting—surrounded by the quiet strength of these ancient walls, a fitting place for Groom and Bride to declare their love. The cave, much like marriage, is carved out over time—through patience, care, and sometimes a little hard work. And yet, what forms is something enduring, something that stands the test of time.

Today, we’re here to witness Groom and Bride join their lives together in marriage. In this moment, we’re reminded that love is not about perfection, but about commitment—choosing one another, day after day, even when things get messy, or difficult, or dark. And through it all, we trust in love to guide us, just as God’s love guides us through life’s journey.

Declaration of Intent

[Officiant turns toward Groom and Bride]

Groom, Bride, you are about to make promises to each other that will last a lifetime. Before we continue, I’ll ask each of you to answer a very important question.

Officiant: Groom, do you take Bride to be your lawfully wedded wife, to have and to hold, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, for as long as you both shall live?

Groom: I do.

Officiant: Bride, do you take Groom to be your lawfully wedded husband, to have and to hold, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, for as long as you both shall live?

Bride: I do.

Exchange of Vows

Officiant: Now, as a sign of this commitment, Groom and Bride will exchange their vows—promises made not just to each other, but before all of us here and in the sight of God.

[Groom and Bride share their vows]

Rings

Officiant: The rings you’re about to exchange are a symbol of eternity, a reminder that your love, too, is without end. May these rings be a constant reminder of the vows you have made today, and of the love that surrounds and holds you both.

[Groom and Bride exchange rings]

Officiant: And now, by the power vested in me, and with the blessing of God, I pronounce you husband and wife. Groom you may kiss your bride.

[Groom and Bride kiss]

Officiant: Friends and family, it is my great honor to introduce to you, for the first time, Mr. and Mrs. [Name].

I pretty much just tweaked the formatting, worked in a couple little friendly jabs at the groom, subbed their names in for Bride and Groom, and ad-libbed a little bit where appropriate

I don’t think it’s really a schwa, at least not the way I say it

A schwa kind of comes from the back of your mouth like you’re saying “uhh…”

When I say possible, that last sound feels more like it’s the little burst of air from the b sort of fading into the l sound

Then again I’m no linguist so I could be out of my depth trying to really describe the noises I’m making, and I’m not very well-equipped to separate how I talk from more general American English (I’m from Philly, and we have more than our share of little linguistic quirks, after all, we pronounce “water” as “wooder”)

If we inverted the last letters of “possible” to “possibel,” that wouldn’t really match how we pronounce it

I’d probably try to read it as something like “possi-bell”

But our actual pronunciation is more along the lines of “possi-bull” not exactly, and I feel like different dialects might maybe lean more towards the last syllable being more like bill, ball, or boll, but I can’t really imagine any dialect where the pronunciation would match a “bel” spelling.

It’s sort of an unintentional half vowel sound that just happens after making the “b” noise, and not really something we’re intentionally trying to put into the word.

Linguists probably have some specific terminology for it, but I’m no linguist.

I’m sure kermit drew some inspiration from Lorne and probably many other people that Jim knew

I kind of think of Kermit as almost a stock character.

I’m sure someone with some sort of Clown College degree (meaning actually professional clowning education, not something goofy and useless like, you know, a Harvard law degree or what-have-you) could probably chime in about how Kermit exhibits some aspects of one or more of the stock Commedia dell’arte characters or something along those lines.

Unfortunately that sort of high-level comedic theory is beyond my education, but I’ll do my best

He’s the everyman, the straight man, he’s you

He’s the embodiment of when your friend was supposed to come pick you up a half hour ago and they’re nowhere to be found and not answering their phone

Or when you’re trying to schedule your next D&D session but 2 people have scheduling conflicts you’re trying to work around, one guy ghosts you and you’re not sure if he’s coming or not, another wants to bring 3 friends and a dog for some reason, and the last one is just blowing up the group chat with his insane homebrew magical gunslinger succubus character idea and their 14 page backstory.

He’s you when you’re the only one who did their part of the group project and you’re fumbling your way through the presentation you cobbled together on your lunch break

He’s when your girlfriend is upset with you and you don’t know why

Or when you look around and it seems like everyone around you is an idiot, an asshole, or maybe just clinically insane.

And he puts up with it because despite all their flaws and quirks, these are his friends and he wants to spend time with them and help them to achieve their dreams, and they all feel the same about him, and he’s not perfect himself, he’s got his own weird bag of insecurities and neuroses that he carries around with him. He yells, he loses his patience, he can’t always get a word in edgewise, he runs around flailing his arms and screaming like we all want to do sometimes, he gets depressed and thinks that everything is fucked, but with a little help from those crazy assholes he loves he pushes on and usually things work out alright in the end, even if they didn’t quite go according to plan.

In general, I have no problem with AI in and of itself.

I just don’t trust any human person or organization to make one, and do it safely or use it responsibly.

There are various different vegan philosophies, some basically won’t consume anything that had anything they view as animal exploitation anywhere in the process

For example, to some of the more extreme forms of veganism, if your vegetables, grains, or other plant-based foodstuffs were hauled in a cart by a horse, or if you used an ox to pull a plow in the fields while it was growing, they wouldn’t consider that to be vegan.

Some also object to honey for similar reasons.

Many, probably most, vegans don’t go quite that far, but they’re definitely out there, and everyone draws the line at a different place.

This is true, and I did think about mentioning that but decided to keep it brief because once I start talking about trusts I’d find myself out of my depth pretty quickly and probably open up a rabbit hole of other financial strategies I’m not prepared or qualified to go down (and also to keep my comment at a more readable length)

But since we opened that can of worms (and like I said, this is getting out of my depth, so there’s a very real possibility that some or all of what I have to say after this is wrong, so take it for what it’s worth)

We also don’t know how much money we’re talking about here. The line between qualifying for benefits and not can be razor thin sometimes, and while we might assume that we’re talking about 10s or 100s of thousands of dollars or even more where a trust would absolutely make sense, we might actually only be talking about a couple thousand bucks, maybe not even enough to afford a couple months of rent depending on where you are, but potentially enough to fuck up someone’s benefits depending on where some government bean counters drew the line. It might be difficult or impossible to find a financial institution willing to act as a trustee for such a small amount, and there may not be any individual they trust to fill that role, and once the lawyers and such are paid there may not even be much left over.

There’s also the possibility that the parents are counting on the sibling(s) to sort of act as trustees without putting it in writing. We don’t know what their relationships and personalities are like, or what conversations they’ve had with their parents that maybe OP isn’t privy to. There could be an understanding there that they’re getting everything so that they can continue to provide for their disabled sibling after the parents are gone, and OP hasn’t been made aware of that (some people are really uncomfortable talking about this kind of stuff and avoid it even though they really should) or misunderstood what the intention is. That of course depends on the siblings being trustworthy and generally having their shit together well enough, which isn’t a given of course and their situation could change drastically.

There’s also the possibility that a trust is exactly what’s happening and OP either misunderstood it or just plain doesn’t like it. A lot of people out there are pretty clueless about financial matters. If the siblings were named as the trustee (it’s often not a good idea to have the trustee be a close relative, but that’s neither here nor there) I could see some people viewing the situation as “they left all the money to my siblings” because they’re not getting a big one time payout and the money has to go through their siblings in some fashion.

Again, I’m talking all in hypotheticals, there are countless “ifs,” “ands” and “buts” here, we don’t know the specifics of OPs situation so we can only speculate.

I don’t recall ever hearing that specifically

Somewhat similar though, I remember being told that anything you put out on the internet is out there forever. Which may not technically be true, there’s a lot of lost pieces of internet history, but the core of that statement isn’t really to be taken literally, it’s more that once you put something online it’s out of your control what everyone else who might have access to it does with that data, you can’t really control what people download, screenshot, save, repost, or when it may resurface.

But back to what you’re saying - even with China and Russia, and other attempts at censorship, the internet still carries on. You can take down, wall off, censor, etc parts of the internet for a lot of people, but taking the entire internet down would be a massive undertaking, probably more than what any country or even any realistically feasible alliance of countries could hope to achieve, as long as there are people with computers linked together somewhere, the internet endures in some fashion.

There’s a lot of redundancy in the internet, there’s no one big box to blow up or one cable to cut that carries the entirety of the internet, it’s millions of devices all linked together in millions of different ways that make up the internet. You can take down parts of it, maybe even most of of it, but it would be nearly impossible to never every last thread of the internet without some truly apocalyptic event happening, even if all that’s left at the end of the day is two nerds on opposite sides of the planet with ham radios hooked up to laptops sending emails back and forth, or some friends sending memes back and forth on thumb drives via carrier pigeon, you could still say that the internet is alive, if not exactly thriving.

I think it’s also worth having frank discussions with your kids about their inheritance and encouraging them to work things out themselves ahead of time.

My family has maybe a bit unusual but I think very healthy relationship with death. It comes for us all eventually, no sense dancing around it.

There’s no complicated inheritance situations in my family, if you have kids everything gets divided up evenly among them. If they don’t have kids it gets divided up evenly among their nieces/nephews.

So for example my parents estate gets split between my sister and myself, my uncle who doesn’t have kids gets split between us and my cousin, my cousin gets his parents’ all to himself.

We’ve already got things divvied up amongst ourselves pretty well. As long as my sister signs over her claim to our parent’s house, I’ll sign over my third of our uncle’s house to her, and she’s happy to buy our cousin out of his third or trade him for her current house (which would also have the benefit of getting all 3 of us in the same town, cousin has some disabilities and it would be nice to have us all nearby in case of emergencies, or the payout from my sister or money from sale of her house plus his own inheritance from his parents would set him up pretty well)

We also occasionally call dibs on some other desirable belongings, like my uncles skillsaw

There’s no one size fits all answer here, it’s going to depend on how much money, how severe the childs disabilities are and what their care needs are, and what other sort of inheritance might be on the table ( for example one child gets the money and another child gets the house)

If the child is able to live on their own, then yeah, it’s a dick move and the parents are just playing favorites and being ableist.

If they have significant care needs- nursing home, psychiatric treatment, home health aides, visiting nurses, etc. then there might be some logical arguments to be made. If they’re already qualifying for some sort of government assistance then a large windfall of cash could potentially disrupt those benefits since they now have too much money to qualify.

That can be a real headache to navigate, they may need to arrange all new care for themselves, maybe switch doctors, find new housing, etc. which may be a lot for them to manage depending on the extent of their disabilities, and unless that inheritance is incredibly large it will probably run out at some point and leave them in a position where they need to navigate the system to get back on those government benefits, which is often no small feat.

So there could potentially be situations where it’s better for them to not leave them money and cause significant disruptions to their care and living arrangements.

This is all totally hypothetical without knowing the specifics of the situation. There’s a million different things to consider here and everyone’s situation is unique, and at best we’re getting one side of this story and don’t really know what the parents thoughts and reasoning are since we haven’t heard in directly from them (and it could very well be that their reason is just as shitty as it appears on the surface, I won’t discount that possibility)

People need a place to live, they don’t need stocks to live. By owning more properties than you need you are contributing to a scarcity and inflated pricing for a basic necessity.

I feel like that leaves a little weird wiggle room though.

Let’s say you’re born in a Spanish speaking country, maybe Mexico, for the first few years of life you grow up surrounded by Spanish speakers, your first words are in Spanish, you only know Spanish, everyone you know only speaks Spanish.

Then when you’re about 3 years old, before you’re even forming really solid, permanent memories, you go to live in the US, you’re surrounded by English speakers, almost everyone around you stops speaking Spanish regularly and switches to English, your English vocabulary quickly catches up to or maybe even surpasses your Spanish ability. Your first real memories are of people speaking English, and you spend the rest of your life primarily speaking English. You still speak Spanish though, you keep up with your education in that language and can speak both fluently.

I think there’s a valid argument that both could be considered your native language, even if Spanish was your first language, you’ve still grown up speaking both.

It depends, some things, like freeze dried fruit may not necessarily need to be rehydrated.

For things that need to be rehydrated, you may not need as much water to rehydrate it to be edible as would be in the regular ingredients. Hypothetically if you were to make soup from scratch, you’d lose some of the water to evaporation as you cook it. If you were to premake and dehydrate soup, it wouldn’t need to be cooked as long or to as high of a temperature - everything is already cooked you just need to rehydrate it and warm it up to your liking, no need to get it up to a boil and simmer it for however many minutes or hours so less is lost to evaporation.

And depending on the area you’re backpacking in, you’re probably going to be refilling you water from streams and such several times along the way so you can plan around that. In the areas I normally backpack, you’re probably going to cross over or hike along a few different streams every day, running out of water isn’t a major concern.

One time in particular comes to mind, where I did have to plan around having enough water to cook my meal. Normally we plan on our lunch being cold- jerky, trail mix, etc. and we do a freeze dried meal or something similar for dinner that requires water. Around lunch time we were by a stream, and looking at our map the area we were planning to camp for the night wouldn’t be near a water source (pretty much at the very top of a mountain) so we decided we’d have our hot meal for lunch so we could refill our water to make sure we’d have enough to last us until we were able to refill later the next day.

It kind of sucked though, as we were getting closer to our campsite, the temperature started dropping, and a thick fog rolled in. By the time we made camp, we were all kind of cold, everything was damp, and we were generally pretty miserable, and we didn’t even have a hot meal to look forward to. So we pretty much just scarfed down whatever jerky or crackers or whatever we had and went right to bed. The next day though, everything had cleared up, and when we made our way to the summit to enjoy the view. We looked down into the valley below us and we saw a cloud, and we realized that the fog from the night before wasn’t just fog, it was a cloud passing over the mountain, and we hiked through it, so that was pretty cool.

But the next time you go mattress shopping and the salesperson is telling you “it’s like sleeping on a cloud” run away, clouds suck and don’t make for good sleep.

I work in 911 dispatch

The location we get from your phone isn’t exactly a magic “here’s exactly where this person is” button.

For the most part, we rely on triangulation from the cell towers, which means the quality of that location is highly dependent on how many towers are around, how close you are to them, signal strength, the surrounding geography, whether you’re inside a building, in a basement, outside, etc. and the location isn’t constantly updating.

I work in an area with pretty solid service, and at my cunter our policy is that if our ping is accurate to within about 300 meters we can use that if we can’t get any other location information from the caller, and most of the time we’re well within that, but not always. And a 300 meter radius is still a pretty big area, if that drops within a crowded downtown area, or if they’re in a high rise apartment or office building, that could be pretty much useless. And it takes us about 20 seconds to refresh the location and the new location may not be accurate when it does come in, so they’re in a moving vehicle they might well be a half mile away from where they were by the time the next ping comes in. And once you hang up we stop getting that location info and if we want to ping your phone again it’s a bit of a process that requires our officers or our dispatch supervisor calling the phone company, faxing or emailing them paperwork, etc. so not something we can just do totally on the fly, and for whatever reason the pings we get when we do that never seem to be very accurate, and it takes some time and we only get one ping at a time, and if we’re lucky we get one maybe every 10 minutes. We can also only request those pings when we have reason to believe that someone is in danger.

I suspect that there’s a whole mess of local/state/federal laws and regulations, and department/agency/corporate policies that come into play with all of this with a million different exceptions, but overall that’s going to be broadly true in most places around the IS at least.

We are starting to get more gps-based cellular location, this kind of depends on your phone’s capabilities and settings, what network you’re on, and your local 911 center’s capabilities. We’re generally a bit ahead of the curve on our technology and capabilities, so that’s not something everywhere can do yet. We’ve actually had it for a while but the implementation was pretty janky and not very useful, but we got some upgrades within the last year or so. It’s usually, but not always, more accurate than triangulation, the location updates faster, and we do continue to get location updates after you hang up but only for about a minute or so.

Generally speaking, we also have no quick way of knowing who’s calling from a cell phone. Your name won’t usually come up on our caller ID, just your carrier. If you have your emergency info filled out on your smartphone and made it available we can access that, but frankly most people haven’t. If you’ve called before and given your name, we can search for prior calls (in our jurisdiction) from your phone number. Otherwise we can try our luck with some free phone number lookup websites, or try to get the subscriber information from your provider, and if you’re on some kind of a family plan that may mean we’d get maybe your parents information from the phone company not yours, and some prepaid plans don’t really seem to have much if any information on their subscribers on file so it ends up being a dead end.

And that’s pretty much the extent of what we can do from 911. There may be other resources cops can use or other options for exceptional circumstances, but that’s outside the scope of 911 tracking your phone.

Also if you call a non-emergency line, even if it’s one that redirects into a 911 center (we answer a lot of the departments when they’re out of the office, some of them just always come into us, and even if you reach someone at the station there’s a good chance they’ll transfer you to our central dispatch) we won’t get any location info and we need to go through the phone company to get a ping.

And calls from TextNow numbers and other similar apps can be really hard to track down.

On further research, you are correct. I’ve heard the thing about it being deductible for the business repeated enough that I thought it was true. Guess that’s just a reminder to always be fact-checking. I will be editing my comment accordingly. I do feel like the rest of my comment still has some value on how to determine whether it’s worth it or not.

Thank you for pointing out my wrongness.

How are we defining “worth it?”

EDIT: THIS IS INCORRECT, the business cannot deduct your donations.Yes, the business can claim it as a deduction on their taxes. If it’s a business you like, maybe that’s a good thing, if it’s not then that may be a bad thing. Does the money that goes to charity outweigh whatever harm may come from that company paying less in taxes? I don’t know if there’s any good way to objectively say that.

You don’t really get much say in which charity that money goes to, it’s just going to whatever charity that company has chosen to partner with. Some charities can be kind of sketchy, not all of them are on the up-and-up. If it’s a cause you care about, you may be better off just donating directly yourself to a charity you trust.

Now your individual contributions doing this are really a drop in the bucket, let’s say you go to a store and donate at checkout 3 times a week, and since you’re rounding up to the nearest dollar, you’re donating a max of $1 × 3x a week × 52 weeks a year = a maximum donation of $156 dollars a year donated by rounding, probably going to several different charities, and realistically you’re probably donating about half of that unless you have some real OCD about your purchases being even dollar amounts, so probably about $78/year divided up among however many different charities the various places you shop at are involved with.

Now of course you’re not the only person making those donations at any given store, each store is probably making hundreds or thousands of dollars in donations between all of their customers rounding up their checks.

Unless you’re really struggling, you’re probably not going to miss the maybe $100 or so that get siphoned off from you making these donations spread out over a whole year.

Can you Deduct those donations from your own taxes? I’m genuinely not sure, my gut says no (EDIT: you can), but let’s say you can. Do you think that $100 or so + whatever other deductable expenses you have in a year are going to beat the standard deduction? If it does, then sure, feel free to save those receipts and try to add it all up, that sounds like more trouble than it’s worth to me, but maybe it’s worth it for your purposes, there’s a lot of different tax situations I won’t pretend to know for certain.

Are those charitable donations going to improve your life? That’s hard to say, I don’t know your life. EDIT to expand on this a bit Are you in a position where you’re going to benefit directly from a charity? If you are you may need to reconsider making a donation because you may need that money yourself. Although there are cases where a charity may be able to make better use of money than an individual, for example being able to pool money from donations to buy things in bulk at a better price, but you’d have to know how that organization is ran and how the money is going to get used to determine whether you’ll be able to benefit from that directly. Indirectly maybe you’ll see some benefits but probably not immediately and it probably won’t be immediately obvious. Maybe donating money now to a charity that supports youth sports leads to some kid taking up baseball who wouldn’t have been able to afford to otherwise which in turn keeps him off the streets, gets him scholarships, etc. when otherwise he might have ended up in a gang or hooked on drugs or something and broken into your neighbors car 10 years down the line to steal some change which resulted in your insurance rates going up because your in a “high crime area” or something. Or maybe it will just give you a warm fuzzy feeling inside.