I was at a regional magnet school, so I probably would have gone to my town’s middle school.

I honestly don’t know what happens if you get kicked out of that- maybe you go to a neighboring town’s school, or maybe there are other schools for kids that get expelled, but the government still has an obligation to educate you until a certain age, so you don’t just stop going to school (unless you’re in juvenile detention, at which point you probably have a teacher on premises).

I forgot to take my adhd medication as a twelve year old and my mom gave it to me as I ran out the door. I put it in my pocket, forgot about it until later, and then nearly got expelled for trying to sell drugs [edit: because it fell out of my pocket] because of a zero tolerance policy.

I say nearly, because I’m white with educated parents and a sympathetic situation, so obviously the zero tolerance policy learned a little tolerance.

Bagels (though now I make my own), fruit/veg, and Mexican food.

I moved to Germany from the USA and I now teach German to immigrants. The most universal experience for immigrants to Germany from warmer countries is the slow resignation not to even try peaches, corn, berries, or avocado (it’s reasonable based on geography, just still sad). I was astounded when my husband said he didn’t like peaches, but then I tried a German peach. They’re woody, flavorless, and expensive.

I used to work in the call center of a regional office for a giant company. I got the opportunity to “apprentice” with another department, which basically meant I would shadow the same employee for an hour or two a week for six months and then I could apply for a transfer and they’d hire me preferentially unless I seemed like a fuckup. The department was staffed with 90% former biglaw attorneys who didn’t want to deal with the rat race anymore and located in the main office. I felt like this the first time I showed up in my nice jeans and a fancy-to-me top to this incredible marbled building full of people wearing suits more expensive than my car.

I got that job, by the way, and less than two years later, it had demoralized me to the point that I left “per mutual agreement” and went back to school to move to an entirely different industry. I did also make enough money in that time to finance a move abroad, including living expenses for three years, visas, bringing my cat with me, and grad school though, so I’m not exactly mad about it in the end.

Didn’t you just post a question asking about this and everyone answered either neutrally or with the smart cat?

A spokesperson for Fox News told Rolling Stone that “Gulfstream Studios produced The Life of Jesus Podcast from The Truth and Life Dramatized Audio Bible, which was licensed by Fox News Audio, with full cooperation and participation by all the actors involved”.

God, I wish it still mattered when people lie

It depends on the contract- If they thought it was for an animated show and it’s used for a podcast, I could see that not being covered, but they should definitely check their contracts. Edit: yeah basically:

Her team added that she never gave permission for the original audiobook – The Truth and Life Dramatized Audio Bible,released in 2010 and acquired by Fox News Media via a licensing deal with a company called Gulfstream Studios – to be repurposed into a new podcast.

It is!

Yeah, freakonomics is often this close to making a breakthrough and then they back off into neoliberalism

I’ve got ehlers-danlos and I am experienced with self bondage. Tying my own hands behind my back is not easy for me, let alone the average person.

I think they’re making the joke that you could outsource body filtration to the oyster.

I’m assuming you’d at least fuck your throat though, because it’s not staying alive without the shell

I have a smart cat who’s not in any way evil. She is, however, very opinionated and she wants things to be just so. If they’re not, she experiences varying levels of distress and will seek to correct them herself in whatever manner she sees fit.

Most of the time, this is a great thing, because I want her to be happy and to give her as much say over her environment as possible, plus it’s good to learn what she likes. Sometimes it’s neutral, like how she tries to bury any food items not currently being held by us, which can be funny or annoying depending on the circumstances. Sometimes it’s bothersome, like her unending and mostly successful quest for all doors in my house to be open at all times.

It can also be simultaneously good and bad, but even so it’s a net positive. She once knocked a glass bottle of lube onto my tiled bathroom floor in the middle of the night (she’s not a big one to knock things over unless she’s trying to communicate with me and she knows how to wake me up if she really wants, so I’m pretty sure it was accidental), then pulled the shag bathmat over the broken glass to cover it up. I was so glad she protected herself from the glass, but cleaning silicone lubricant and broken glass out of a shag rug is basically impossible.

It is striking sometimes what she can actually understand, as someone who grew up with labradors, though. My old housemate used to take her exploring in the basement and she learned the visual and practical differences between an opened and a closed padlock. I don’t know if that’s actually as wild as it seemed, but I was very surprised to see her ignore all of the locked doors and sit waiting patiently only in front of doors that were closed, with unlocked padlocks through the bolts. They were all effectively equally locked to her, but I think that’s where the brunt of her intelligence comes through- she can gauge how to communicate very well with people in general and my husband and me specifically. She also knows what types of things we can change (generally- she seems to think I control thunder and gets very annoyed that I don’t just stop it), so she’s got a good grasp on how to affect the things in her environment either herself or through us.

I think she has the potential to be a mean cat, but I try to listen to what she wants and do as much of it as makes sense (I didn’t let her into my neighbors’ unlocked units, for example, and I had a conversation with my housemate about showing her things she can’t explore), which she seems to notice. I think if I ignored her wants and needs, she’d lash out a lot more.

For example, when I play rough with her, I stop when she makes a small specific sound or when she puts her paw without claws or her teeth on my hand without any pressure. My husband plays rougher with her and she makes much more significant noises. At first, he kept playing past the noises and she brought the claws out. If he played past the claws, she’d gently bite him (still in warning). I can absolutely imagine that if I were to generally ignore her cues, she’d gradually ramp up her aggression level.

I suspect part of what makes living with her so easy is that she’s barely food motivated. She’ll come running if she hears the treat bag, but she doesn’t want to eat the whole bag at once. I can free feed her without her gaining weight or the food going stale, and with the exception of a non gustatory affinity for carrots (she just thinks they’re neat), she doesn’t bother me for food at all. She did change a little bit when I moved in with my husband, because I’m a vegan and he’s a butcher. She learned that human food can be appetizing and now she’s a lot more interested and very occasionally persistent about smelling/tasting his food, but she still leaves mine alone.

And the value it provides is enough to prop up the entire car insurance industry with incredibly inflated salaries at the top, and pay for a good portion of the damage caused by car accidents plus a fuckload of attorneys paid trying to avoid the rest of the damage.

I’ve been given time to fix something myself before we call a professional, which seems reasonable to me. Even the time window of an afternoon, for something as important as heat makes sense, because you don’t want to be unheated overnight and have your pipes freeze

One of these things is not like the others

I had tubthumping stuck in my head and wasn’t nearly wet enough/using good quality lube, in retrospect.

Edit; we stopped and had lunch naked together, then went back to it and had a much better time.

I wanted to be a naval pilot engineer at four. I’m colorblind, terrified of heights, not fond of authority, sloppy, and scatterbrained as hell. It’s quite possibly the worst possible job for me. To be fair, part of the reason was that I hated the word “bellybutton” and thought anyone who said ”navel” instead had the right idea, so it’s not like I really understood that part of it.

Temperance was led mostly by the protofeminists who wanted fewer drunk husbands beating their wives and then taken over by xenophobes and antipapists who realized that alcohol use was correlated with immigrant and catholic communities. At least at the start, it was very grassroots.

I’ve always heard to put them on top of an already cooked slice, don’t cook them at pizza oven temperatures. That might be why you didn’t trip, but it might also be an old wives tale

Okay, I’m starting from the position of: authoritarian countries are not functional countries.