Definitely, normally my skin is pretty resilient, never really been someone who needs to spend money on moisturizers and such, I could probably just about wash my hands with acetone and steel wool and be none the worse for it.

But there were a few times when I worked there that my hands were getting noticeably dryer than usual, pretty sure if my skin were any more delicate I would have been in pretty rough shape.

We definitely called them cardboard cuts, can’t say how universal it is but every job I’ve where I’ve handled a lot of boxes it seems to be in pretty common use

Cardboard cuts are absolutely a thing, like a paper cut on steroids.

I used to work in a warehouse and spent most of my day opening, resealing, making, and breaking down boxes. Spend enough time around them and the boxes will get you.

So first of all, the US is big and diverse, if you hop in a car and drive from New York to LA without stopping, taking the fastest route, mostly on major highways, averaging out to something like 60+mph (about 100 km/h) you’re still going to be spending just about 2 days in the car.

And in between, you’re going to see a little bit of everything, mountain, plains, forest, farms, huge dense urban cities, towns small enough you can barely even call them a town, suburban sprawl, massive industrial facilities, you name it you’re going to see it.

Overall, if you live in an urban area, the situation may not be too bad, cities are somewhat walkable, there’s public transportation that will usually get you fairly close to where you need to go, there may even be protected bike lanes, etc. although the situation will vary wildly from one city to another.

It will even vary from one part of the city to another. You can have large sections of the city where there’s no real grocery stores or other places to get your basic necessities, and you’re pretty much limited to whatever you can get from corner stores, bodegas, convenience stores, etc. (mostly pre-packaged and processed foods, and if you’re lucky maybe a couple pieces of fresh fruit) and if you want anything more than that you’re probably looking at taking a few hours out of your day to walk a significant distance to a store or take public transit that may not go exactly where you need it, may be slow, expensive, or just a pain in the ass to deal with, etc.

Getting out into the suburbs, it’s again kind of a crapshoot. There are some walkable suburbs, with wonderful shopping options, there’s some that are a maze of residential developments and gated communities that come off of major roads with no sidewalks or even shoulders worth speaking of and you’re taking a significant gamble trying to walk anywhere from there. There may be little or no public transportation and if there is it may not be going anywhere you need to go, or be convenient to get onto

Personally, I live towards the rural end of the suburbs, about an hour or less from a major city depending on traffic.

Damn near everything I could ever want or need is within about a half hour drive, and most of I commonly need is covered within about 15 minutes.

If I don’t have a car though, my options drop off significantly. I’m looking at an hour walk one way to get to a grocery store, mostly along a long winding road with little or no shoulder and few streetlights. The only things I would really feel safe to walk to are 2 pizza shops, a small hardware store, a bar, a CVS, and gas station/convenience store, those last 2 are going to be about a half hour or longer walk, and along that winding road, but it’s a stretch that at least has a half decent shoulder and some lawns to walk on for most of the way.

If you have a bike, there’s a decent bike trail that will get you to some more shopping options, but it’s about an hour’s ride one way.

If you need to catch public transit, you’d have to walk about 2 hours to catch a bus, that line basically runs straight up and down a main road between the city and a larger, urban-ish town further out in the suburbs. There’s not many options to transfer to anywhere else along the way but there’s a lot along that route so if you can get to that bus most of your needs will be covered, but it doesn’t run super frequently and it’s not going to get you anywhere in a hurry.

Getting out into rural America, you have some small towns that are functionally self-contained, with their own grocery stores and other shopping options in-town within walking distance. Your options are limited but for the most part everything you really need is right there in town.

If you don’t work in town though, and often people in these areas don’t, they may be involved in farming, logging, oil/natural gas, construction, etc. and may work many miles from town, you’re pretty much screwed if you don’t have a car, or at least can count on carpooling with a coworker.

There’s other small towns where there just isn’t much of anything at all, maybe they have a gas station and a liquor store, and if you need anything else you’re SOL, in some cases you may be looking at an hour or more drive to get to anything else so you can forget about walking.

Regardless of where/what kind of area you find yourself in, transportation between cities is often going to be an issue. You can probably catch a Greyhound bus or maybe Amtrak or similar between most major cities, though you may have to get a little creative with figuring out your route, but if you’re trying to get to the smaller towns in between you may not have much luck.

There are, of course, nearly as many exceptions and special cases to everything I said as there are individual towns and cities.

I understand that I come from a place of pretty significant privilege, but it is wild to me that when faced with these kinds of situations anyone is gambling on the kinds of medical care they might/might not be able to receive in these red states with restrictive abortion laws.

I know that if any of my friends, even if we’re not particularly close, came to me and said they needed me to drive them halfway across the country for an abortion because they may not be able to get life-saving medical care in our state if something goes wrong, we’re going, right then and there, no questions asked, I’m calling out sick from work, running up my credit cards on gas and hotel rooms and whatever else we may need and we’re hitting the road, and if needed I won’t ever breathe a word of it to anyone.

The fact that people are in a position where they feel like they can’t do that or don’t have people they think they can trust to do that for them is maddening.

I sometimes like to entertain sort of a radically modified 2 state solution.

Both sides get their own state, the catch is neither state is in Israel/Palestine.

We carve out 2 Israel-sized chunks of land that are nowhere near each other from the emptiest space we can find in large developed nations, maybe the American southwest, siberia, australian outback, Canadian wilderness, etc. The world throws money at the problem for them to set up any schools, government , infrastructure, etc. they need to run a country in that space, then we draw straws or flip a coin to determine which gets to be the Israeli state and which gets to be the Palestinian state.

Then all of the residents get 2 options. They can go set up shop in their new country, or they get a one-time free pass to pick any other country in the world and be granted instant citizenship.

No one gets to stay in Palestine/Israel. It gets overseen directly by the UN or something as a giant world heritage site, people are free to visit, play tourist, make pilgrimages, etc. but no one gets to live there full-time, anyone who works there to facilitate tourism, conduct research, maintain facilities and infrastructure, etc. must be kept on a strict schedule where they’re cycling in and out of the area so that they don’t spend more than half the year there without special permission. Anyone caught attempting to live there gets departed to their home country immediately.

The new countries’ borders are strictly enforced, no trying to expand the borders, settlements, etc. and it’s up to them to negotiate what the border situation with their surrounding country.

If they can’t play nice, we’re taking their toys away from them and sending them to stand in opposite corners of the room to think about what they did.

If any verifiable God/Messiah/prophet, etc. should happen to show up, we’ll defer to their judgement on the matter.

There are, of course, a million different reasons why this can’t/won’t happen, and hopefully they’re obvious enough that I won’t have to explain why it’s a crazy fantasy.

Little context on that, we obviously camp and hike and such a lot, so trees are pretty much what we have available in the woods. And one of my friends has a pretty messed up septic system at his house that he’s reluctant to put too much money into servicing because he’s allegedly on the list to be hooked up to the city sewer at some point, so we go outside when we can to avoid stressing the septic system too hard.

We don’t normally expect women to use the trees at his house (they of course don’t have many other options when we’re in the woods) but a couple have risen to the challenge over the years and more power to them. I don’t think anyone has come prepared with a go girl, sheewee or other such device, they just pull down their pants and pop a squat behind a tree, but we’re a bunch of old boy scouts so we’d certainly applaud anyone who did for being prepared.

Just pointing out a straw man doesn’t do much good if you don’t also point out why it’s a straw man. Please add to the discussion, debate me’ try to light my straw on fire.

I personally go a step further.

Everything in the universe is following the laws of physics. We don’t know all of the laws, and we’re limited in what we’re actually able to perceive and measure, so some of it seems like random chance. But at the end of the day, everything is playing out according to those laws.

Your thoughts, feelings, etc. are all just physical and chemical reactions happening in your brain, no different than iron rusting, water evaporating, unstable atoms decaying, etc. you don’t get any more say in what you think, feel, say, or do than you do over whether vinegar and baking soda are going to react with each other.

The only thing special about us is that we’re aware that things are happening, even if we can’t fully perceive the causes. We don’t really get any say in what the meat we inhabit does, even if it something feels like we do, we’re just along for the ride, but the fact that we’re aware it’s happening is pretty cool. There’s a quote, I forget by who and the exact wording, that we are “the universe experiencing itself” and I think that’s all we’re doing, experiencing. We don’t genuinely have any agency, not even about what we think about the experience, because thinking is a part of what we’re experiencing.

If somehow you knew the exact state of every elementary particle that existed the moment the big bang happened, and had a complete rulebook of all of the unknown laws of physics we have yet to discover, you could theoretically trace out the paths those particles would take from there, what other particles they would eventually collide and interact with, how those interactions would play out as they come together to form nebulas, stars, planets, and eventually yourself and everything else around you, and you could keep going tracing out the paths of those particles into the future and see what becomes of everything in the universe and how it all ends (if in fact it does eventually come to an end)

I could be wrong, and if it ever turns out we do have an actual say in what we think, feel, and do, that would be even more amazing. If not though, I’m satisfied to just be along for the ride to see where I end up and what I can experience along the way.

I overall agree that for some things it can make sense to have separate gendered spaces, shelters make sense, I can see gyms, etc. places where people are feeling particularly vulnerable, self conscious, dealing with trauma, etc. and being around the opposite gender could be a part of that.

But in other cases, I think the right move is to get over ourselves and be rid of pointless gendering in some activities.

A lot of my friends and myself are traditionally “manly” in a lot of ways, outdoorsy, cigar smokers, whiskey drinkers, a lot of us work with our hands, like guns, etc. That said, we’re a pretty enlightened group, we’re not out shit-talking our wives and engaging in demeaning “locker room” talk and such when we get together to have what could be loosely called our “boys nights out.” It’s happened from time to time that a female friend ends up tagging along and absolutely nothing changes about our behavior, the fact that there is a woman in the room in no way takes away from the experience, and if anything adds to it in a “the more the merrier” sort of way. Any woman who is willing to put up with the cigar smoke, fart jokes, peeing on trees in the woods, etc. is more than welcome to come along, it just happens that most don’t enjoy that.

Now of course you also run into a whole lot of complicated situations, the way men tend to interact with other men, and the way women interact with other women are different. I’m not going to go into all of the nature vs nurture, societal expectations, toxic masculinity, etc. involved but all of that certainly plays a big part. I’m no sociologist, but my overall impression (and I may be wrong)is that women can kind of mesh into the male social structure without making too many waves provided that the men aren’t assholes (which is far from guaranteed,) but it’s very hard for a lot of men to get themselves into the right kind of headspace to participate in the sort of socializing women want and need from their social groups without disrupting things to the point that the women aren’t able to get what they need out of it.

And circling around to shelters, men may need more shelters by sheer numbers, but on average each individual homeless woman is probably in a more vulnerable position than the average homeless man. Really more shelter space is needed across the board.

And the horse people will try to retort that dog poop takes longer to break down, smells worse, and is more likely to spread disease

Which is true, still doesn’t justify not cleaning up after your horse. Just because the horse manure is “less bad” doesn’t make it ok.

Another thought that crossed my mind, since most of these people don’t live with their horses within horseback -riding distance of most of these trails, so these people usually have to go hitch up a horse trailer to a gas guzzler of a pickup truck and drive sometimes a pretty considerable distance to take their horses out. Often the parking areas at the trail heads aren’t particularly well suited to accommodating a truck and horse trailer, and they end up being kind of a parking nuisance on top of that.

If they do where you live, I’m happy for you, but I’ve spent a lot of time hiking in my area hiking on shared use trails and have never seen any rider clean up after their horses or who even looked like they were prepared to, and there is always horse manure along the trails.

Cops should too, I make no exception for them.

They absolutely are, and if there were any ATV trails in my area I’d feel just ash strongly about that. As it is though, a lot of these trails aren’t even open to pedaled mountain bikes (partially because they spook some of the horses) and with the ones that are, there’s some significant debate on whether e bikes should be allowed.

Horse riders should have to clean up after their horses on trails.

I’m a big believer in leave no trace in the outdoors. To the best of your ability, everything should be as you found it when you leave the woods.

Wild horses have been extinct in north America for many thousands of years, in my local area as far as fossil and archeological records can show any native horses that might have existed here were long gone before the first native Americans set foot here. They are not a part of the ecosystem.

I don’t care if it’s biodegradable, I wouldn’t leave apple cores and banana peels behind either.

The environment in my local parks isn’t so delicate that a few entitled rich assholes leaving behind horse shit probably isn’t going to make a significant impact, but there are other places where it absolutely could, throwing off the chemical composition of the soil, contaminating ground water, causing algal blooms, introducing non-native parasites, bacteria, and pathogens, etc. and you should be following best practices across the board. Treat every inch of the outdoors as if it were potentially vulnerable and don’t try to bend the rules just because you think you can get away with it.

And it’s just an eyesore and detracts from the natural beauty.

The horse people fire back about how they can’t carry a shovel with them, or how they may not be able to safely get on or off the horse. This is the shit horses were bred for- to carry people and stuff, I can find you an avalanche shovel and a small folding step stools that will break down plenty small and light enough to fit in a backpack or lash to the saddle with some rope to pull the stool up after you get on, and it’s all gonna weigh a lot less than the armor, and rifles, bedrooms, etc. that people used to ride horses with for a lot longer and harder than the couple house you’re spending plodding along the trail. If you can afford to go horseback riding you can afford the hundred bucks or so for a shovel and a step stool. If that’s not enough for you to get on and off your horse safely on the trail, maybe you should take that as a sign that you shouldn’t be riding a horse there, stick to a dude ranch where some big strong cowboy will help you get on and off of the horsey.

I’m also bald, but even before I started shaving my head and had long hair I wore a lot of hats. Still helped keep the sun off me and I tend to run kind of hot so it helped keep sweaty hair out of my face.

I have a couple hats similar to those kicking around, they mostly get used when I’m camping, hiking, etc.

My main every day summer hats are a panama straw fedora, a linen flat cap, and very occasionally a trucker cap that I mostly use as my fishing hat.

I also have a straw cowboy hat that I only bust out occasionally, when I’m both feeling a little silly and I’m gonna be out in direct sun for a long time, like out in the middle of a lake on my kayak. It looks a little goofy, I’m certainly no cowboy, but it’s practically like walking around with a shade umbrella on my head.

I tend to run pretty hot and sweaty, so when the sun isn’t a concern, I often wear a bandana to keep sweat out of my face.

My wife has a very big, floppy hat she wears at the beach sometimes, looks like straw but is actually some sort of recycled plastic.

My mom would not be able to wear a hat during the summer obviously heat would stay in and she would get too hot.

I think you’re starting from a faulty assumption here.

In general, it’s often wise to wear a hat in the summer and can help you feel cooler providing a little bit of portable shade, and helps keep the sun out of your eyes and off your face/neck/ears/shoulders.

It’s just about finding the right hat, something lightweight, breathable, and preferably lighter in color (to reflect the sun’s rays instead of absorbing them) and maybe with a wider brim.

Straw hats are a fairly traditional option, something like a panama hat (actually made from palms, also made in Ecuador and not panama BTW) is a classic option, but this is 2024 so there’s lots of moisture wicking synthetic material options out there as well. For other natural materials, linen is also a good choice, certain types and weaves of cotton can be pretty light and breathable, and honestly even some lighter weight wool hats aren’t too bad.

Take a look at people who work or spend a lot of time outdoors in warmer climates, you’ll see a lot of people wearing hats or cultures where people traditionally wore a lot of hats even if they’ve fallen out of style. Baseball caps, visors, cowboy hats, fedoras, pith helmets, beater hats, various types of headscarves, big floppy sun hats, bucket hats, asian conical hats, sombreros, etc.

I wear hats pretty much year-round. The hats I like in the summer are different from my winter hats, but it’s pretty rare that I go out without some kind of hat, and when I forget to grab one on my way out the door, I feel less comfortable for it.

I’m just curious what your interpretation of yellow laces is. I’m not a punk but am vaguely aware of lace codes, and every list I see online has yellow as anti-racist, but I know it varied a bit from place to place.

I take part in a lot of outdoorsy activities, there’s kind of a split. Lots of conservation-minded folks like myself, and lots of assholes who don’t seem to realize or care that they won’t be able to go hunting, fishing, etc. if they develop over all the woodlands, poison the waterways, etc. and just want an excuse to shoot something or justify their much-larger-than-needed, lifted, coal-rolling truck.

Also a fair amount of people who don’t feel particularly strongly either way.

Sales of hunting/fishing licenses and such do end up funding a lot of conservation efforts, though arguably in a lot of cases the money doesn’t necessarily go where it’s most needed.

The more conservation-minded folks tend to be quieter about their interests and don’t make it their whole personality, they’re usually not the ones posing with a deer or fish in their profile pic.

This chucklefuck:

“babies born with any deformities or disabilities should be shot in the forehead.”

What trump was trying to scaremonger about and claimed democrats support in the debate:

He also says execution after birth, it’s execution, no longer abortion, because the baby is born, is okay

Seems he’s once again confused