infuziSporg [e/em/eir]

But does it include a bike lane?

Of course vaccines and fluoride in the water are going to be the targets of this regime. They’re extraordinarily effective for a modest cost. There isn’t a whole lot of business to be done around them outside the public sector.

Compare that to painkillers, plasticizers, and various food additives, which make billions a year through poisoning people. The deeply rotten stuff won’t get treated, and we’ll get distracted by a red herring instead.

Uses a Mercator projection to capture the northernmost 25 degrees of latitude as a quarter of the map

Cuts off the southernmost 75 degrees, including all of Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Namibia, Botswana, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Mozambique

Also, strength and conditioning, and a little bit of parkour. Nothing fancy like flips and spins, but being able to get up or over or down from a fence or wall or pole or tree is very useful. Being able to do a few pull-ups is a good baseline for practical fitness, along with being able to run a 7-minute mile. Body-weight exercises are all you really need; no fancy equipment is necessary if you understand how to work out a muscle group.

Cooking for large groups is an important skill. You can scale this up from large batch/mealprep to small gatherings to large gatherings. I’ve seen several large gathering situations where it was extremely noticeable when there was just 1 person skilled with this, and also when there wasn’t.

Scrapping/dumpster diving. Works best if you have a decent amount of storage space and a cargo-suited vehicle. Tapping the waste stream yields bounties. All sorts of things can be fixed up or sold or even used as-is.

No one’s mentioned this yet, and I don’t relish it personally, but being good@car is extremely useful. Everybody has car trouble once in a while, and being able to fix it yourself can save you or your comrades up to thousands of dollars a year.

Kimchi and sauerkraut and kombucha/jin are all way cheaper to make yourself rather than buying. Cheese and bread, not so much.

You can also pickle most perishable foods to make them last longer.

Wild Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz is a fantastic resource. It was reading an abridged version of this in zine form that got me started doing fermentation.

Anything before the mid-2000s will have an advancement requirement where you jump fully clothed into water over your head, and either turn your clothes into flotation aids or throw them to shore.

There are lots of streets where if you walk down the sidewalk, someone’s dog will start barking at you, and then the other dogs along the block will hear it and all start barking at each other, this can go on for a surprisingly long time.

Ah so the data was pre-Uber, pre-GrubDash, pre-Instacart, 10 years pre-Covid.

I’ll have you know I don’t believe in coincidence.

That’s not how statistics works. Even if the 10m walkers are maximally represented among dog-keeping households (instead of more evenly distributed), with no more than one walker per dog household (also extremely unlikely to not be clustered), at most 50% of dogs get walks from their owners.

Also, I have 0 dogs and I walk/run/bike 30-150 minutes a day.

Cain is for Charlie. And Delta is for Cain.

do you think theyre friends or do you think its a coincidence

In completely unrelated figures, 45% of American households have a dog.

These things weren’t written for ancient people. They were written for us.

They were part of religious practices continuously from about 700 BCE to today. Not everything is specifically about you. Get over yourself.

Or, don’t, and instead go start a New Religious Movement novel sect around your unique short-circuited theology.

All of Genesis is metaphor and mythology.

Textual analysis shows that there were at least 3 very different parties that wrote parts of it. Multiple instances within it are self-contradictory, even after making a huge allowance for meanings lost in translation. The narratives are very incomplete and function identically to pourquoi tales. The book serves to connect the Hebrew people specifically with an origin story of their own particular ethnicity distinguished among Semitic peoples, that concluded at the point that was already well-known, i.e. the first historical traces of Hebrews being situated in the domains of the Egyptian New Kingdom.

The book was passed down through oral tradition for hundreds of years, and then edited for hundreds more. There is no “original” or “pure” version of Genesis, only a consensus that was developed in writing. The survival and ubiquity of the Pentateuch is not a testament to anything inherently special about it, but to the hardiness (and eventually the fanatical cruelty) of the peoples that transmitted it. You can’t just say “the Bible is independent of history”. At least, not if anyone is going to take you seriously.

Believing literally in texts like that is for chumps; it broadcasts to the world how gullible you are and how willing you are to suspend your logical thinking to be a good little peon to the relevant authority, instead of making your faith more nuanced and dynamic and extensive by contextualizing it. You’re not grappling with faith if the result is already a foregone conclusion.

If you have two individuals repopulating their species, you have a genetic bottleneck which often jeopardizes or alters the species. I mean, come on. There is a suspension of disbelief that this kind of fundamentalism requires, and this is a kind of mental self-stunting.

As a human being, your understanding of science, history, economic affairs, and geography has progressed since you were 5 years old. Why would you stick with a theology that floundered at the 5-year-old level? I believe in a spiritual savior figure forging a connection from God to humanity so that humanity might become more Godlike, not some embodied whim of a demiurge living out a story so that humanity might stay childlike.

Also, in case you haven’t noticed, you posted to a communist instance of Lemmy. The plurality here that are tolerant of Christian beliefs are particular to a range of practices that take tradition and reason into account along with scripture, and often personal inspiration too. The reactionary and self-serving contortion known as Calvinism, infamous for being propagated by some of the vilest Dutch and Anglo imperialists, is despised here.

No, it was an accident, not arson!

First apartment (outside of college dorms) was fairly smooth. I had classmates who lived off-campus and that put the idea in my head that this was feasible, I checked the nearby student-oriented options and picked one that ended up being far cheaper than university housing.

First date was a stroke of luck. Right after move-in my first semester of college there was a sort of club that I joined, and one of the other new people there became my best friend and then, within a short time, my girlfriend.

First job of any sort (20) was a small number of hours per week and a shoe-in through college connections. First job that supported myself (mid-20s) was from responding to a classified ad in the paper, for something I had the physicality for and also some distantly-related experience.

The one thing I would belabor to my past self is to eradicate the sense of shame. Go out there and do the things that feel like they’d be humiliating, say the things that you don’t feel comfortable speaking up about (as long as the intentions are good). This includes asking for help when you need it, which is probably before the point when you really feel like you need it. You don’t get life experience by things going smoothly and according to plan; you get it by going into the weeds. Never be averse to being a beginner, this is part of what keeps you fresh. There are lots of kinds of discomfort that are very fruitful.

Including taking the Yahwist narrative and the Elohist narrative both literally, simultaneously?