That duck is looking pretty tasty right about now.

I'm with you generally. The whole boarding experience causes a tremendous amount of anxiety for me to the point that i'd rather drive for anywhere I can get to with a <16 hour drive.

MythBusters had an episode related to airplane boarding. If I remember right, the current scheme is the fastest, but it's due to the fact that everyone can't follow the rules.

This used to be common in "the olden days" in rural America. I remembered the school nurse would hand out the fluoride rinse to students who's families signed up for it. I remember thonking that they were all the rich kids who's families could afford the $5/year for their fancy oral hygiene. Well who's laughing now? I've got the most expensive teeth after all my fillings, crowns, root canals and dental surgeries!

Yeah, i'm leaving all the grammatical errors in there; it better illustrates my point.

I rather like what the Japanese do, which is to mask up if you are sick, thereby preventing the spread to others. I would like to see statistics to know if it is effective. This could have the same net effect, but impact a smaller population.

Slightly tsngental, as a severe allergy sufferer, I appreciate how the pandemic somewhat normalized masking in public so I can just wear one without people asking me prying questions, assuming I'm a freak (I am, but don't assume it until you get to know me), or moving to a different seat on the bus when I sit down.

Agreed. How about the other guy? Was anybody inspired by him?

I'm really sad that it's come to this. It's how I feel when my coworkers vote to go out to a sushi restaurant. I don't like fish and I'm allergic to shellfish, so I eat my pile of steamed rice and bite my tongue when they want to split the bill equally.

What was I talking about again?

Who uses chrome by choice?

This is what I do anyways because I am too impatient to watch through 15 minutes of blah blah to reach the end and hear, "in my next video I'll actually show you how to dobthe thing that you came here to see."

Give me a decent web page with searchable text and a few pictures (if needed) and I'll be happy.

Vote.

I ran my small HOA for 1 term and people came at me, bitched about stuff and I got them to come to a meeting where the other homeowners could express their concerns about the proposal and we'd come to an agreement and write up a change. It was no big deal. We even negotiated group rates for shared services and made it so that the costs of the HOA were offset by the savings from the services.

On the other side of the coin, when I left my position to give somebody else a turn at the process I largely automated, they ran it into the ground and bankrupted it while chasing a personal grievance against the city.

Somehow, the HOA attracts power hungry nobodies but they can be voted out if you're willing to work at it. Also, talk to your neighbors. My guess is that there are others who would back your proposal.

I used to struggle to get to sleep and hated those who could do it anywhere. They'd say, "just clear your mind", which wasn't helpful. It could be other things, but I figured out that my mind was always busy, sometimes from stress, sometimes from excitement. For me, it's extreme focus. Often, I'll put my mind to work on a complicated problem I'm having at work or home. If I have nothing, my go to is to see how far I can get calculating the binary digits (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64...) or the Fibonacci sequence in my head. I don't get very far and I'm out.

I read somewhere that the thought that you can vote with your dollars makes you feel good and empowered to make choices, but is overshadowed by the fact that doing so means that whomever has more dollars has more votes.

Regarding Congress, I was really hoping that this big fear of TicTok would result in some sort of GDPR type laws which empower the individuals to take control of our personal data, which could also be used to prevent our personal data from being used against us by foreign countries.

To MTG: you're white and white people owned slaves, so you're directly responsible for slavery.

I read a paper a few years ago that basically said that food insecurity is not a problem with production, but is instead a problem with distribution. The USA throws away enough food to feed another good sized country. I don't know the exact nature of the distribution problem and whether it's a problem of resources or something else, like s political problem.