… I almost never travel not solo, so apologies if I don’t know what the other side of the coin is like

I think the biggest advantage is the absolutely ridiculous amount of freedom, because you can cater to 100% of your own needs, and your own needs alone. Want trip to be cheap? Youth hostels and 10-hour Flix/Blablacar buses exist. Want to do nerdy things only you are interested in? No need to care for travel companions for “wasting” 10-hours in a modern arts museum or anything like that

I did hear that some people find traveling alone a bit lonely though… so maybe it is not for everyone. Oh and maybe booking restaurants can get a tad awkward depending on the place I travel to

I think I’d be a good person to answer this. I’ve lived in Houston (needless to say, extremely car-friendly) without a car for almost 2 years; currently I’m living in a city that banned cars within its city center in 2015 which resulted in very visible changes, but the rest of the country is still very pro-car and quite car-friendly

A couple of things that cars benefit everyday life that would be difficult to do without a car. There’s probably more but these are the ones I can think of:

• Accessibility to places that have difficulty justifying being served by public transit. These include poorer neighborhoods that are far away from city center, semi-rural natural preserves, extreme geographical difficulties, … Case in point, Houston has a lot of nature/green spaces that were 20-30 miles outside of the city center… good luck getting to these without a car (trust me, I tried once)
• For certain physically disabled people, driving would be easier than walking/biking/public transit… Especially in particularly hilly cities, centuries-old cities where roads were paved no better than playgrounds, or sometimes both. This can be somewhat mitigated with good infrastructure projects, but cars are usually an easier solution
• Car-free zones can get very crowded, very fast. This is usually a good thing in terms of urbanism… but some find it uncomfortable for various reasons. My current city is actually a rather extreme example: they are now considering banning bikes in the city center too, due to pedestrian injuries
• I know cars are prone to needing repair, but with how the road network functions, personal vehicles can reduce a lot of dependencies on external factors such as public transit being functional. Case in point, two months ago NL’s national rail company became essentially non-operational due to extreme weather, which would be rather devastating if your only way of commuting to work relies on the train

Also I think some positive points associated with cars are doable without cars:

• Hauling stuff from point A to point B: delivery companies and car-rentals exist for a reason! This is surprisingly doable even without owning a car (you are technically using someone else’s car in this case). Of course doing it without your own car will be more expensive… but we do have the logistics for it, especially if the entire society shifts to a car-free model
• Not all rural areas need cars: some are actually quite doable by walking alone due to how small they are (I have a friend who lives in a rural American town like that: yes everyone drives, but everything is also 30-minutes on foot if you don’t mind walking). And there are quite a few parts of the world where rural towns are served by trains frequently
• Road trips: scenic railways exist for a reason… and unlike point 1 I made, sightseeing trains actually do make money, so there is pretty good justification for building them

• Slay the Spire. I have played quite a few roguelikes before StS but I never played much card-based games at all, due to me never playing boardgames or TCGs… so this was obviously a new experience for me. Almost 1000 hours on record now with the game, cleared A20H with every base game character (and did A20H on almost every Packmaster pack)… which should speak for itself
• Dancerush Stardom, that funny shuffle game. This is Konami’s attempt at making a beginner- and normie-friendly rhythm game… which never quite caught on (aside from random YouTube recordings having several million views). I wasn’t particularly fit & never knew about this game before at all, so it was a pleasant surprise to me that I liked it so much. I have 5-star cleared many of the hardest songs in this game so

I don’t remember, I wasn’t very into cars at that moment… I just know it was a pretty common car brand among taxis in an economically backwards part of China, so most likely a budget Chinese or Korean brand. Also it was a stick shift

In STEM specifically? STEM field in particular is somewhat known for fostering Imposter Syndromes… Most people are smart enough, I wouldn’t sweat it too much

The best thing… depending on how I ask I guess. Either the day trip I made to two nearby towns (one of which is a rather well-known tourist spot) on Sunday despite the rainy weather, or the fact that weather rose to 20 C yesterday & was sunny so I made a nice stroll in the city

Not very well traveled yet but at the moment… either Prague/Praha in Czechia or Ljubljana in Slovenia probably

Both are pleasant places with beautiful architecture, all kinds of natural scenery as someone who has only lived in flat cities (mountains AND rivers in my city??). Bonus point that Prague has dirt-cheap beer that even comes in alcohol-free variety, Ljulbljana has a ridiculous amount of hiking trails and is within day-trip distance to some of the most beautiful scenery in Europe

I think this is a matter of the microeconomics concept of “scarce resources”? It’d be lovely if everyone in the US learns at least Spanish. But school can only teach a limited number of subjects, so in the US where most people don’t need to use anything other than American English, it might be argued that it is more beneficial to spend more time on, say, STEM and history, rather than getting kids to learn Spanish/German/Chinese… I guess there are foreign language electives for that reason? They are still highly valuable after all

Besides, learning and teaching a foreign language is hard lol. China used to (I’ve heard rumors that some places changed, not 100% sure) require mandatory English education from 1st grade elementary… social issues with the English teacher expats aside, the English literacy rate in China still looks like that. There are even multilingual countries in Europe where a good number of people struggle to learn/speak the other national languages so… Even if the US wants to do it, it’s not that straightforward

China. Much, much better, but it’s a bit unfair to compare someone who grew up in a typical modern society to someone who grew up in time of extreme poverty, subsistence farming, and famine…

Although, my parents did go to better universities & got better careers right off the bat due to a lack of educated ppl back in their days

Not a party, but my parents took me around to meet and dine with a few of their friends (mostly somewhat accomplished folks) as a farewell of sorts. I got sent to the US for college 2 months later and basically never had a chance to go back home in 10 years so

I… never learned how to cook properly. Parents did cook all meals at home but only knew how to cook things about as delicious as your average Northern Europe staple, so the only thing I was taught was how to cook rice… but I do not like rice 💀

Out of convenience I ended up just throwing everything in a pot and make sure they are well-cooked, do meal-prep, and eat the same food over and over again; personally don’t mind so it works for me. If it is not enough taste, just throw in some olive oil and spice, if not good enough more spice, if still not good enough add MORE spice, usually works out quite well & is quite healthy

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Yes. Parents made me learn touch-typing with QWERTY when I was growing up

I actually made the effort to switch to Colemak-DH less than a year ago. Because getting a properly labelled Colemak-DH keyboard is so difficult (my laptop keys are still QWERTY layout), I… basically forced myself to learn how to touch type in like 2-3 months. Still can’t do the multilingual symbols very well (I always forget where the ^/circumflex is…), but I think I have a >98% accuracy on everything else

Unfortunately I forgot how to touch type with QWERTY after learning the new setup…

Define “nobody”, because there are over 100 languages spoken at fluent level or above by at least a few ppl where I live

If we ignore the technicalities… Polish. Spoken by a lot of people, quite difficult to learn & would be a good priority target for magically learning it, and hopefully a good gateway to the rest of the Slavic languages

This legitimately happened to one of my former colleagues 🤣 Told them where the largest local shelter is, and next thing I knew boom they had 2 cats in their apartment one week later

I guess Japanese really doesn’t have in-your-face sarcasm now that I think about it…

Now that you mentioned it, Japanese also has a rather interesting quirk of not having what most people would consider as “swear words”. Read it somewhere that Japanese does have swear words, but they tend to be quite tame, and the words themselves aren’t “taboo” (as compared to just about any swear word in English)

For the average person it is probably Xiaomi: made in China, and even by Chinese phone standards it seems well known for its low cost and high build quality

However as a lemming and someone who has a Xiaomi gifted by parents and hated everything they crammed in the OS… How do you define a “best” brand of cell phone when there are barely 3 usable brands (Google Pixel for GrapheneOS, Fairphone, …)

I know this is not c/casualconversation but OP you gave me an opportunity to share the funniest dating story I have ever heard of, from first-hand experience unfortunately. This was in middle/late 2023

I… am not that great. Pretty mediocre looks, Asian guy (there’s research on this lol) in the US, and the Autism is very strong… so I only ever got 2 matches, neither of which worked out. One of them was particularly brutal because we talked on the app for a whole month, finally met in a coffee shop… and I immediately got ghosted afterwards. I think at that point (2 mo) Hinge started only showing me ppl I have already seen so I deleted the app. However

The person I talked for a month with mentioned a local arcade that I didn’t think much of. Later in 2023 I decided to visit, on 2023-12-09… and holy shit they have all my favorite games, and they even had a DDR (technically ITG) cab and a maimai cab that are basically workouts. I instantly signed up for the monthly membership (which was way cheaper than a gym) and started going there at least 3 times a week, probably for like 3-4 hours at once. That was literally what got me through the end of grad school

I still have a picture I took the first time I went of a Sound Voltex cab (6th gen, “EXCEED GEAR”) and how I got destroyed on a song I would now do as a warmup routine… which is why I knew the exact date I visited the arcade btw, the picture is timestamped

So what was I typing. No dating pool isn’t great

I play a lot of games over steam

If my main concern is playing game with Steam, most mainstream Linux OSes should be fine. If I have to pick one… Linux Mint is very beginner-friendly, and I’ve heard great things about Bazzite too. SteamOS works flawlessly with Steam out of the box (owns Steam Deck, can verify), but I don’t know how easy it is to set up by yourself

If you happen to also like non-Steam games: a lot of them can be added as a custom application/game via your Steam Library, which does most of the heavy-lifting: you only have to specify which compatibility layer to use & sometimes do keymapping. Setting up wine on its own is not for the faint-hearted

I personally use Arch because AUR (a user-uploaded repository, a lot of popular Linux OSes have their own versions) makes it easy to play a lot of FOSS games… but I can’t recommend Arch Linux for beginners

As a kid I dead-pan told my mom that I’d like to be a "white-collar office worker. Because I wanted somewhat of a predictable routine without too much unexpected things happening

Considering that this is already my second postdoc (somewhat of a scientist training… intern… thing) “job” (no employment contract btw) within 2 years of my graduation, during which I have moved twice including once across a continent, and once getting work-related anxiety so bad I got sick for a month… I think young me’s plan is preferable at this point