My dog has to smell my breath after I eat/drink something. If I’m eating a sandwich, he’ll watch the whole time, and when I’m done, he’ll hop up and start sniffing/licking for crumbs.

Then he’ll stand on my lap, and put his nose up to my face, sniffing and kinda wagging his tail. I’ll open my mouth wide, and start exhaling, and he’ll eagerly start sniffing riiiiiiiiiight up against my mouth, wagging and kinda shifting his weight on his front legs. And if you don’t listen closely enough to his sniffing…

… He’ll sneeze in your mouth. 😂 He makes my friends do it too, and I do warn them about keeping their mouth open too long.

Beyond that, the only other weird thing he does (besides his crazy yoga poses he does in blankets on the couch) is lick the floor. If I’m cooking, he’s standing by the stove, ready to lunge at anything that falls to the floor. But when I’m done cooking, he’ll basically walk the entire kitchen floor, focusing primarily by the sink and stove, licking every speck of oil and crumb he can find. You’d think I never feed him based on how he acts towards food, but here we are. 😂

He nabbed some chili seeds off the floor one night before I could get them, and I asked him how they tasted while he’s walking around the kitchen, licking his chops over and over. Moved to his water bowl, drank a good chunk of that, moved to the living room, laid down there for a bit… All the while, licking his chops, trying to get the spicy to go away. And then he came back for more 😂

No, you’re trying to play it off as the other commenter pointed out, as if it’s just kids will be kids.

You don’t accidentally stab someone to death. This wasn’t a “fuck up,” if you read the article, or even what I wrote in the comment above, you’d see that the kid followed the victim around after they had already tried to disengage from the guy with the knife.

Knife guy sought them out, escalated the situation despite the victim and his group trying to get knife guy to leave them alone, and then stabbed him in the chest.

Where’s the accident in that?

We’re not, the victim lost everything: their future, their life, moments with family, etc. And you’re making it sound like, “Well, yeah, but he just made a mistake.”

You don’t stab someone to death by mistake, it isn’t a “fuck up.” Killing someone via stabbing is an aggressive, personal, close quarters kind of death. You can’t stab someone to death “accidentally,” and during the act, did he ever stop? While the victim was likely shouting in pain or pleading or trying to get away, did the kid stop his “fuck up”?

No. He knew exactly what he was doing, and there’s no rehabilitating that, especially if it occurred after a brief conversation in public. He forfeited his right to his life as soon as he took his victim’s, when he chose to willfully stab a man to death.

Edit: Literally the first sentence details how the two boys had the four-minute conversation with the victim, followed the victim around Birmingham’s city centre, and then stabbed him to death despite the victim being a complete stranger.

And neither boy showed any remorse or emotion during their sentencing. The one who actually stabbed the victim tries to claim he feared for his safety, and was “just trying to scare the boy.” Guess that’s why he needed to plunge a large knife into the kid’s chest when, as the judge pointed out, all they did was try to get Mr. “Just Fucked Up” to leave them alone.

The kid fucked up.

He stabbed someone to death, he didn’t accidentally total his step dad’s Corvette.

The man he killed is never going to go home again, and he’s not going to do anything for the next 70 years. His family will spend every holiday without him, every milestone in their lives passed without him.

Because “the kid fucked up.” 🙄

I attempted to deliver cremated remains once while I was a carrier for USPS. I say “attempted” because you have to have the recipient sign for cremated remains, but they weren’t home…

I’m not sure how I’d describe it, but it’s an odd feeling leaving a “Sorry We Missed You” pink slip for a person versus a package.

The goal was always 1.5°C as long as I’ve been alive, and we aren’t hitting it. In fact, we’re not even on track to hit the 2°C.

The goal posts didn’t move, buddy, we just already kicked the ball into the stands, and you’re screaming that we can still win. Sorry, we lost, but at least we made the obscenely wealthy even wealthier in the meantime.

Oh, and all of the things I’m bringing up, those “shifting goalposts,” are the things I was talking about us not understanding and rapidly building on top of each other year over year. You only keep talking about emissions: ok, cool, they’re important, but they’re not all that’s involved, and even then, we’re still** not hitting our own goals, so we deserve a pat on the back and a cake?

And while we’re at it, how are the millions of people in America alone who can’t afford a $400 car repair going to afford a $30k+ electric vehicle? Or are we going to overhaul our entire public transportation system overnight so people don’t need to rely on cars at all? But then what about all the old ICE vehicles thrown in junkyards, leaching chemicals into the ground?

What about the Ogalala Aquifer and how we’re pumping the water out of it way too quickly for it to naturally replenish? Y’know, the aquifer that essentially waters our entire crop growing landmass in the Midwest. We know pumping all of this groundwater out of the ground out in places like Nevada, Arizona, etc is terrible, yet I don’t see any politicians banning the practice at the local, state, or federal level. What are emissions going to do about that, and what, are we just gonna pump the water back in to the underground aquifers that took millennia to naturally form?

How are emissions going to stop the soil erosion we’ve witnessed since the Dust Bowl? What emissions and electric car policies are stopping the growing of monoculture crops that need too much water to be grown where they are? How are fractionally dropping emissions going to reduce the use of fertilizers to grow the same crop over and over in the same place, not giving the soil time to naturally replenish, and further running freshwater supplies with pesticide runoff? Explain to me what laws regarding emissions and electric cars are going to address that?

While we’re on the topic of food, who’s ready to have the conversation about how you should only be able to buy and eat food that can be grown locally to your region? It is not environmentally responsible or sustainable, especially with current metrics, to ship millions of tons of food stuffs all over the globe, and this isn’t even me trying to be a smartass: you should not be able to buy avocados in Minnesota, you shouldn’t be able to buy chocolate in the Netherlands, etc. It’s not sustainable, and the ships we use to move them are burning millions of tons of CO2 per trip.

Have you taken into account any of the economic factors of what it will take to upgrade our grid to handle that? Or to even get our infrastructure to be more energy efficient in general? Not our driving infrastructure, our actual buildings and dwellings, what’s the plan there to make all of the dwellings in the US more energy efficient?

It’s not just emissions, my man, there are millions of moving parts all feeding into each other in different ways, made even more complicated by our global interconnectedness and vastly varying priorities. But the goalposts never moved, we just didn’t realize there were more of them than we initially thought, and focusing on one or two metrics that we’re not even close to meeting, while also continuing to not also address anything else… Gore was our last shot, and it was robbed from us.

But he won’t.

What is this crap? EVs are all over the place and so is renewable energy. Emmissions are falling. We haven’t opened a new coal plant in a generation.

Ok, and how environmentally friendly is it to dig up the minerals to make the batteries, ship them to the plants in massive container ships, process them through polluting means, put them into cars that were also built from resources ripped from the earth using machines billowing CO2, and then shipped across the globe in container ships that pollute more than all cars combined on Earth?

And ok, we haven’t opened a coal plant in a generation, maybe in the US. China is still building them, as are a good chunk of the world. In fact, the IEA estimates to China’s use of coal will be up about 6% total from 2023, while India’s is an increase of 10% of coal use. They estimate global coal use will be down next year, 2025, the first time since 2016, and it’s estimated to drop 0.3%.

Ok? It’s bad and we’re working to fix it. That’s very different than “we’re all doomed and should stop doing anything”.

Do you understand how biodiversity works? You can’t just run a population down to a handful of that species, and then they’ll make a comeback as if nothing ever happened. There is not enough genetic diversity for a healthy and sustainable population to grow and repair itself from that. 69% of all life on earth has been wiped out, bud, we’re not fixing that.

https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement

Lmfao, “a legally binding international agreement,” yeah, ok. That’s why a single President unilaterally removed us from the agreement, right? Because it’s legally binding? And that’s why all of these countries are taking it seriously and making huge efforts to reduce global emissions, right? They’ve only had since adopting them in 2015/2016 to start making progress, almost a decade, and… Omg… Omg you’re right!!! We’re doing it!!!

Just kidding, from September 2024:

None of the larger, industrialized countries or the European Union as a whole are currently on track to meet the 2° Celsius goal. African nations Nigeria, Ethiopia, Morocco and Kenya as well as Costa Rica and Nepal are named by the Climate Action Tracker to be on track to meet the 1.5° Celsius goal using a fair share approach, while Norway is predicted to meet the 2° Celsius goal. The website analyzed the climate policies of 35 countries and the EU.

Wow, so the countries that are supposed to be leading the charge aren’t even on track to stop 2°C temperature rise, nevermind the 1.5°C we’re supposed to be aiming for.

But we’ve got more electric cars, and we’re still consuming and ordering things from across the globe, so it’ll probably all work out if we just believe hard enough.

Edit: Switching to electric cars doesn’t prevent the pollution of microplastics from tires, btw, another massive part of climate change everyone seems to just be covering their eyes and pretending they can’t see. We found microplastics in the clouds, ffs, nevermind in our own blood and bodies.

Nor do electric cars stop the glaciers that have already retreated way further than they should from retreating further. Where’s all that methane gas, y’know, the more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, remind me, where is all that methane that was trapped in the ice going? Oh, right, it’s feeding into the climate cycle, making things rapidly worse while we twiddle our thumbs and tell ourselves science will fix this for us, nothing else needs to be done.

Lol, sorry buddy, not something I can just… Do. There’s gotta be context/history/etc, lol, they’ve gotta earn it.

THIS is the grifter bullshit. “Don’t bother acting, it’s too late”. Fossil fuel doomer propaganda.

That’s not what I said, I said it’s too late, we missed the exit. Fossil fuel companies hid the research for decades, and I’ve heard nothing my entire life except how we need to act and change the ways we live and interact with the world.

I’m almost 30, and our dependency on fossil fuels hasn’t changed, I’ve yet to see a meaningful societal shift away from the consumerism that drives the majority of climate change.

And ok, we keep driving emissions down, what about biodiversity loss across the planet? How many plants and animals are currently on the brink of extinction?

Let’s bring up developing countries, who are increasing their use of fossil fuels. Where is the international agreement to help modernize these countries with renewable energies? Who’s going to pay for it? We can’t get the countries of the world to agree we’ve overfished the oceans and they’re on the brink of collapse, where’s the international agreement to reverse that?

I would argue I’m giving people a pessimistic reality of the future, sure, but at least it’s based in the current reality. Climate change extends far beyond the overall global temperature, and I’m sure climate and environmental scientists will be the first to say that there are a lot of pieces and variables we don’t fully understand, or haven’t even accounted for, because that’s just how science works.

The effort isn’t enough, and that’s the problem. U.S. emissions dropped 2.7% from 2023, that’s great, but that still means we pumped 4.8 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere (I don’t remember the exact phrasing your article used).

We’re still pumping too much in, and not taking any out, and we’re already hitting limits we needed to avoid. And based on that recent AMOC collapse report that came out, a lot of these climate models weren’t even taking that into account, so I highly doubt we see a reverse of course on climate change as it continues to expound on itself year over year.

The WWF reported a 69% average decline in all animal species populations on the planet since 1970.

We missed the exit, everything until the cliff is grifters trying to set themselves up for the inevitable collapse at your expense.

Blazing Angels. Amazing flight simulator fighting game that I still have the discs of for either XBox or XBox 360.

The game is still listed on Steam, but you can’t buy it. I absolutely loved that game growing up, making your way through the ranks, taking part in some of the biggest air battles of WWII.

I told a cousin once I wasn’t going to be lectured on morality by a woman whose sole contribution to society was how much money she could spend at a liquor store. That whole post I wrote was honestly, according to my brother, some of the best criticism he’s read, quote, “You called her a lush without ever actually using the word, while also going up one side of her and down the other, saying everything the rest of us wanted to.” That cousin, to this day, will not interact with me at family gatherings.

I also once threw shitty advice I was given back into my boss’s face in my resignation text, to the point where he mentioned it felt “personal” when he called me to try to get me to stay. That was the resignation friends/family told me I should be a writer because, “You have a knack for telling people to go fuck themselves in a way where they thank you afterwards.”

My go to, though, when someone insults me is to usually respond, “I’ve been called worse by better.”

Are you saying the driver is wearing the seatbelt, the passenger(s) aren’t?

And how does the death result? Is it because of an accident? Are they messing/moving around in the car? Are they legally allowed to not be wearing a seatbelt in the vehicle?

There’s too many undefined variables I think for anyone to give you a solid answer.

America: our mail system is. USPS processes 23.5 million packages per day, and processes and delivers 318 million pieces of mail every day, to every single household in America, 6 days per week (7 days per week for packages).

They will throw mail sacks onto the backs of donkeys and trek them down into the Grand Canyon to deliver to tribes down there. They will deliver by bike, plane, boat, truck, car, etc. Hell, name any other organization where you could hand someone a letter and $0.62 and ask them to take it to Alaska for you, and they’d say no problem.

“Post” roads in the U.S. are named as such because they were roads built specifically for the movement of “post” across the country, and people have even argued that USPS (then the Postal Service) created the layout of the country as we know it.

And despite what many may think or know, USPS is incredibly efficient when it comes to mail and delivery compared to other countries. I remember them telling us during our orientation (I used to be a mail carrier) that back around 2013, representatives from USPS were actually flown to Germany to teach and help them start delivering 6-days per week. USPS taught Germany how to be more efficient at something 😂

Saw another article that puts the 10th percentile of AMOC collapse around 2037, and 90th percentile around 2062, both from these same scientists.

I think we’ll be lucky to make it to 2040, personally.

Every person is three meals away from being radicalized. Not my quote, not sure who it’s attributed to, but I’ve seen it on the internet over the years.

I agree, shit will really hit the fan when people can’t find food/water anymore, or at least have it not be readily available. Personally, I think it’s coming sooner than people are expecting just because climate change will compound on itself year over year, and we’re doing damn near nothing to mitigate any damage (still pumping ground water up like it’s an instantly renewable resource to water golf courses in the dessert, for example).

But radical people tend to be desperate for change, and most people get desperate when they start to actually get hungry.

I had a coworker who cited music licensing as the sole reason he can’t find his favorite show anymore: The Drew Carrey Show. Whatever schmuck owns the music licensing refuses to cooperate with the rest of the show owners, so it can’t be streamed or distributed anywhere.

Another example would be Scrubs, most of the songs used in the show (including key moments and the OG songs were perfect for them) have been edited out and replaced because of licensing issues. Unless you’ve got the DVDs or pirated older versions, you’re stuck with the new music and it’s not the same.

Met a woman on OKCupid back in like 2014. We seemed to hit it off, so we agreed to a mall date since we were both broke (she was a college student, I was a youngster in the military). We were gonna get food and just kinda walk around and window shop and talk. Gonna try to keep this short, but a lot happened:

1. Had me pick her up from her dorm, went up to the dorm, her roommates were drinking even though everyone was underage, and they’re thanking her for having mom get it for her. She’s super nice about it, but proceeds to complain the entire drive and start getting emotional because she hates that they drink when they’re underage, etc. Yet… She provides it…

2. She doesn’t eat when we get to the mall, and instead spends the whole time I’m eating, talking. No breaks for me to respond, just keeps going.

3. We start walking around the mall, and she starts randomly pinching me. Like, painfully, randomly pinching me in my arms and torso. I’m finally like wtf is with the pinching, and she says that she was doing it because I wasn’t holding her hand while we walked around… We just met, and the vibe is already pretty crap, and how in any way is that a way to communicate…

4. We finally leave and get back to her dorm, I walk her to her door, and I’m invited in by her/the roommates. Fine, I decline drinking because I’m a good sailor, but my date and I exchange some pleasantries with the roommates and then head to her room. It’s basically just a bed, I think maybe she was just super nervous at the mall and being in her own environment she’ll relax.

5. We’re just chatting, and the pinching starts again, and she’s kinda just going for it with no breaks. I’m getting pissed and finally grab her wrists and tell her to stop, and she bit me. On the chest, like, hard, not a romantic playful lil love bite. I’m, again, taken aback and am like, wtf?!?

6. She starts giggling and tells me that that’s how women tell guys that want to make out/get intimate. What?! No, not how that works, at all… Especially not on a first date. But, fine, I tell her she can just ask, figuring she just wants to make out.

7. After a little while making out, the pinching starts again, and apparently this time it’s how women say they want to have sex. I wasn’t so turned off, it just didn’t happen, like, at all.

8. She walked me back to my car, and I drove her back to her buildings door, and she bursts into tears about her roommates and the drinking again, I console her enough for her to feel better and go back to her room. Say goodnight, and she just sits there staring at me. I’m kinda done at this point and just ask what, and I get, “No kiss?” Fine…

9. Get a text while I’m driving home telling me it was one of the best dates of her life, she really hopes we can see each other again soon, she really liked me and was attracted to me, etc. I respectfully declined, and when she wouldn’t just take that as an answer, I sent her a text essay outlining basically all of the above, and I honestly can’t remember if she responded.

Honestly, she wasn’t a bad person, and maybe at different stages in our lives things could’ve gone better… But she had a lot going on and a lot of life to live and learn from, and I wasn’t up for the ride. Hope she’s doing well, if she sees this and recognizes it, and that she stopped using pinching as a means of communication.

Oh, and to illustrate how hard the pinching/bite were, I had dime sized bruises all over my arms and torso the next day, and a bite mark bruise on my chest.