I’m a Satanist. I would be fine dating an atheist, depending on their morals and ethics. I would probably be okay dating someone that was agnostic, since technically most atheists are agnostics. I could date most reform Jews, since for most of them it’s a cultural religion, rather than a literal one.

I would not be able to date anyone that sincerely believed in a supernatural deity, because I would not be able to respect them, or trust any of their conclusions.

Honestly, my advice, unpopular as it might be, is that unless you plan on riding a motorcycle you should probably get an automatic transmission car instead of learning on a manual transmission. Manual transmissions–in the US, anyways–are largely relegated to performance vehicles where people want them. But the hard truth is that automatic transmissions do a better job at driving efficiently and keeping the engine at a safe and ideal load than any driver with a manual. And it’s a lot less hassle for most of the driving that people tend to actually do. For instance, it’s uncommon to have a cruise control on a manual transmission car, which makes long drives more tiring, and stop-and-go traffic puts less wear on an automatic transmission.

If you plan on riding a motorcycle though, you must learn to use a clutch, because all non-electric motorcycles use a clutch (usually a wet clutch, but Ducati uses a dry clutch); manual transmissions are lighter and more compact, and weight matters a lot on a motorcycle.

I say this as someone that learned to drive on manual transmissions, and exclusively had cars with manual transmissions up through about 2022.

Learn to shift based off the sound of the engine, dont stare at the tachometer.

Do not do this.

Every engine has a different redline. The redline is based mostly on piston mass, which doesn’t necessarily correlate directly to engine displacement, given that it’s common to have 4, 6, or 8 cylinders in a car. If you’re shifting primarily based on engine sound, you can be shifting too low in one car, and then too high in another. The tachometer is a much more reliable way of learning where you should shift in any given vehicle.

Also, constantly running your car in the maximum power band–which tends to be close to the redline–probably isn’t great for it.

I’m guess that you don’t live in the US? Almost all cars in the US–whether training vehicles or not–are gasoline, and it’s mostly larger pickup trucks that are diesel. VW is one of the few companies that sells consumer cars that are diesel, and I’m not sure that they do anymore, not after there was that huge scandal about intentionally cheating EPA emissions standards with their diesel cars a decade back.

Thought I could/should work through discomfort and then pain at the gym, supersetting overhead push-presses and triceps dips. LOL, nope, gave myself a labral tear and tore my supraspinatus. My shoulder now has an unpleasant popping feeling + significantly less strength when I’m doing anything like a bench press with my elbows properly tucked; I’ll likely never be able to do narrow grip bench press or triceps dips again.

Why was this dumb? Because I was a personal trainer, and I fucking know better than to try and push through pain. But I was trying to get back into lifting seriously after losing a lot of time to the pandemic.

Okay, people in the US generally didn’t though. How is the information going to get to them, when mail took months, phone calls were not realistically possible, and telegraphs were incredibly expensive? Unless it’s getting reported by the major news outlets, the majority of people in the US simply didn’t have access to that information. Given the propaganda that was coming from both sides at the time, reports might not have even been very believable to the average citizen.

Average people simply didn’t have access to information at the scale we now enjoy at that time. Leaders of countries and militaries might know, but unless it was being reported by wire services and in local newspapers, the average person would have had no rational way of finding out about it.

I’ve had a car with where the oil pressure sensor failed; combine that with an oil leak, and you quickly have a major problem. So, what happens when the sensor telling you the oil level fails? A dipstick is extremely unlikely to ever fail to work correctly, so…?

Depends on how much you drive, and what the recommended interval is. If the interval is 7k miles, and you drive 18k in a year, yeah, you need to change the oil 3x/year.

It seems to me that counting the number of cycles each makes, and basing your intervals off that would make more sense than mileage. If I’m constantly running at high RPM, that should require more frequent oil changes in terms of mileage.

SCO crashed and burned in part because they tried to sue multiple Linux providers claiming that they owned all the rights to certain pieces of code that they’d contractually leased from IBM, and that IBM giving code to Linux distributors violated the terms of their agreement with IBM. It was a lawsuit that dragged on for over a decade and a half–I think that it’s still going–and it’s bled SCO of tens of millions of dollars ,esp. since they’ve lost nearly every single claim they’ve made.

Which “legal experts” are claiming Trump could be facing prison? If they actually have JDs, they should be disbarred for incompetence.

SCOTUS has already ruled on this; the president has very, very broad immunity from any criminal prosecution. The case was dropped in Florida because his stealing highly classified documents was an “official action”; if that can be handwaved away, then so can defrauding the country with a shitcoin pump-and-dump.

InRangeTV and A Better Way 2A.

I’ve met other supporters of both groups, and they’ve all been pretty cool people.

I’m strongly considering supporting Galen Druke’s GD Politics now that FiveThirtyEight has been shuttered.

Hmmmm.

So what does it mean if I enjoy practicing hojojutsu on my consensually non-consenting partner…?

I used to have a fairly large collection of skulls that I’d found while walking around in the woods.

Not sure what ever happened to them… Probably lost them in one of my many moves.

I dunno, bourbon is nice too. And it has the benefit of usually being a lot less expensive than a Caol Ila, Bunnahabhain, Ardbeg, or Lagavulin. Rye whiskey is another one.

But Jack Daniels can fuck right off.

A coworker that got pissed when things didn’t work and threw them across the shop floor was getting fired. He was getting fired mostly because the owner of the company–hereafter referred to as Asshole Boss–was a dick, and the coworker scared him. (Note that the coworker was never violent towards people. Just machines.) Anyway, the Asshole Boss got a bunch of cops there on the day that he was gonna fire him, but the employee heard what was going to happen and just… Didn’t show up.

This is the same Asshole Boss that fired me maybe a year, year and a half later. He fired me because I had a ‘bad attitude’ because my partner of ten years had said that they wanted a divorce two days earlier. I got driven straight to the hospital and checked in after telling my supervisor that I was going home to commit suicide. Yeah, the suicide part didn’t work out after all. (The divorce was ugly; they tried to bankrupt me and saddle me with all of their debt.)

…But it all ended well. Asshole Boss fired the management team that was making the whole business work in a fit of pique; the management team got some funds together and started a company that was in direct competition with Asshole Boss. I ended up being their first hire. Asshole Boss ran his business into the ground in less than a year and a half, and the company the management team started is growing and expanding a decade later.

Encapsulation, yeah. That’s usually what they do now, since encapsulation is usually cheaper, and generally less disruptive.

I did in Chicago. And I absolutely would again, because it makes my house much less likely to burn down from e.g. an electrical fire.

I quit smoking a decade ago; my risk of lung cancer was–is–far, far higher from smoking than it ever would have been from living in a house with asbestos insulation in the walls and around pipes.

I’m still in favor of asbestos. It’s an amazing material for preventing fires AS LONG AS you never disturb it. The people that were most at risk of cancers were the people involved in the mining, manufacturing, and installation of asbestos products, but once the asbestos-containing products were installed, they were almost entirely safe for the occupants of the building. You could, in theory, largely mitigate the risks to the miners, manufacturers, and installers, but that is… Well, expensive. And people have a really bad tendency to ignore health and safety warnings when they’re inconvenient. You see the same issue with quartz countertops; they’re known to cause silicosis in people that are doing the cutting unless they do wet cutting for everything, and wear PPE, but a lot of people don’t, because wet-cutting is messy and slow, and PPE is hot and uncomfortable.

There was a big movement in the late 90s to remove asbestos from old buildings; the current advice is to encapsulate it, and leave it in place.

They’re eggs taht have blue-tinted shells. Really. AFAIK, aside from the color, there’s no real difference between them and brown or white eggs, if the chickens laying the eggs are treated equally. Free range & cage-free eggs, particularly with small flocks that aren’t just eating chicken feed (e.g., they’re also foraging) should have a slightly better nutrition profile. People with more discriminating palates than I have say that the yolks have a more orange color, and a better flavor.