When I was a dancer - if one of us was injured, they made us come & watch the practice because apparently your body does gain knowledge just by watching.

But that was with a baseline knowledge already.

I think it would help, learning about swimming before doing it. More so if you are already physically active in some other way though.

Radio. I still listen to radio over the airwaves, and received by an antenna, as it has been done since 1920.

Bicycles are not much different since around 1900.

English to Vietnamese or Vietnamese to English is harder than, say English to Spanish or Arabic because the sounds are so very different - I am sure I simply can’t hear some of the different sounds in tonal languages, and had a friend who moved here from Taiwan when she was so young she learned better in English than Taiwanese but still she could not hear the difference between ear and year.

I don’t think it’s impossible but do think it’s unusual. My dad was bilingual English and Spanish and I wish my parents had done the “one speaks English one speaks Spanish” language immersion but we only spoke English at home.

I’m American. I regularly walk to the shop that’s 1.75 km, won’t drive it because it’s too close.

The closest Real Grocery is 2.5km, that I take electric bike. Same for the Whole Foods that’s much farther (5.5km) but that I consider an adventure ride and certainly not a walk. The groceries would melt by the time I got home if I walked.

All of these my husband drives to, and I think that’s more typical. I have hangups about driving short distances.

Could be, sure. But also might not. That’s not really something we can know now, but I think we can know that a pyramid scheme is unsustainable. The price of less polluting renewable energy is falling fast, for one thing. I personally don’t think the big population is all bad, so many people means more good people too. So much technological progress.

I get this, but we can’t have an infinitely expanding population, at some point it will have to stabilize, and there has to be the glut of old people at the beginning of that. People are aging more slowly than in the past, at least, even if living longer more of those years are good and can be productive.

Knee pads?

I don’t use my car much anymore, so would consider that liquid, and could make the kids pay some rent now they are working (not much), if I sold that and nothing in the house needed repaired or maintained (ha ha ha) I am at almost 3 years. So I guess if I had some fatal illness and was willing to run out all of both my &my husband’s retirement money I could stop working. Well, no, nevermind, I couldn’t, because the medical care would bankrupt us. But we would not immediately starve anymore. It only took half a century to get here!

I have eclectic taste in music. Mostly I give thanks for streaming services and radio - back when we had to buy albums I got literal anxiety because there was simply no possible way I could get even 1% of what I liked, and the thought of cataloguing it also oppressed me.

So -

I do read Brooklyn Vegan occasionally for stuff I might not have heard of, and tours, Pitchfork for live versions of songs.

I also let the streaming algorithm have its way with my playlist often, when not listening to a whole album. And I listen to radio (literal FM community radio) shows I like, and sometimes my kids scoop me on some artist they think I will like. And understand that the universe of music I might enjoy is blessedly so large I will not get to the end of it.

Oh and I go to concerts - often I have found bands because they opened for someone I went to see.

You know - the only thing you can really control at all is yourself. So it can be true that the world sucks, but making yourself suck is not going to do anything except hurt you, yourself. And make the world a little bit suckier.

So regardless of the outside circumstances, the best action is always to work on yourself. Generally speaking that does make you look differently at your circumstances too, so that you might be able to improve your situation with some action but even if those circumstances don’t change you are still better equipped to deal with them.

My kids have theoretical public transportation to school, work, we live near the bus routes in several directions.

To work or the high school - that bus runs 1 times per hour. So they can only arrive very early or very late, and it’s about an hour walk to either of those.

The bus route to the university is actually pretty good, runs every half hour, and takes about 40 minutes to get there (vs. 10-15 minutes drive) then you have to trust your luck with the loop runner bus that goes from the transit center around the campus, that adds between 10 minutes and an hour, randomly because it has no schedule, just drives the loop all day and arrives whenever. There is an app that tracks it so you can know whether to risk crossing the huge road between the transfer ramp & the uni.

Has this man never eaten a sandwich? Pizza? French Fries? Tacos? What is this nonsense?

I do have thoughts in words, language. I don’t exactly hear or see it but it’s definitely language based. Often two levels of thought, one superficial and another underneath, thinking about those superficial thoughts.

Ha! Not religious, but yes from Catholic background both me & husband. I do like kids, and they are all glad now to have such an extensive network of siblings. White mostly by way of Southern Europe on my side, husband mostly by way of Eastern Europe.

4 I gave birth to plus 5 step kids - when we married 3 were already grown and 4 were in high school, only 2 were small (and we doubled up on birth control) so we didn’t have an impossible household situation. Enough kids to draw conclusions about the school system though.

I can believe this. Not fake, not gay. The math teaching of the past was so dumb. Even now, I have 2 kids who never got a bad math teacher and still love math; two who did (one teacher who actually thought women ought not get higher education) and those two do not

And a good math teacher is a treasure beyond words. Mr. Galing, if I could have had you teach my kids through high school I would have taken them anywhere.

Oh this is going to sound like my mind is in the gutter, but there have been a couple of NSFW collaborations between smut posters who met on the NSFW then made some posts together. I find that just delightful.

If we can stop things ending up in the Gulf, instead of polluting it -

Stop fertilizer runoff and disappear oil rigs, move all hotels back from the beach by a quarter mile or so.

If that option is unavailable, Ron Desantis, Rick Scott, Ashley Moody and Beth Bondi, Citizens United, and the gerrymandered voting district maps.

I use plastic produce bags to cover rising sourdough.

Always use the peels of the pineapple to make tepache!

I looked at my paycheck (US) vs. one of our Swedish colleagues when I was doing our payroll, and yes, the tax was about 45%, my federal withholding is much less but once you add in the deductions for 401k (unsecured pension scheme) and health insurance (that doesn’t cover anything except annual wellness until we pay in 8,000 USD) and social security (the fed pension being paid now to old people, and their healthcare) my deductions also leave about 55% of my pay for net pay.

The part I object to most in terms of cost here is the healthcare - my deductions may mirror the Swede but I don’t think they also have to cover the first 8k of cost out of pocket.

(Edit - it was Sweden not Denmark)