I wouldn’t say “unaccepting”, but I really just did not like kids at all. I didn’t enjoy playing with them, or even being around them because I felt I had to moderate myself due to their presence.

Then I had kids and now I really enjoy being around kids, playing with them, and talking to them, even ones that aren’t my own.

The NFL preseason to Super Bowl lasts about 6 months. That means they were going about 6 months after the Super Bowl with no significant events or anything else to draw revenue. So the people who run the NFL wanted to do something that could drive revenue during that half-year when they aren’t playing games.

So they marketed the hell out of the draft. They turned it into a big media event so they could sell sponsorships and put it on TV so they can sell ads.

It’s entirely a manufactured event to drive revenue.

I think you have a much higher opinion of French political culture than is warranted.

I’m generally curious why people get married beyond the “because I love them” when it costs so much money.

Getting married doesn’t have to cost virtually anything. Really just the application fee to get a marriage license. The specific price will vary by state, and even by county (within the US, not sure how it works outside). Where I live, you can go to a courthouse and get married for $35.

If you plan to have kids, there are a lot of legal reasons why it’s just a lot simpler to have kids. The same applies without them, to a lesser degree, but with kids it’s just so much more of a hassle to not be married.

You’re right that you can achieve most (maybe even all?) legal benefits of marriage through trusts, wills, etc. But that’s a hell of a lot more work, and the lawyer fees, filing fees, and application fees are almost certainly going to cost you more than a cheap courthouse marriage. Not to mention the added work for yourself.

Beyond all that, though, the single biggest reason I wanted to get married and have a wedding with lots of friends and family was to stand up in front of everyone and profess my love for my (now) wife, let her do the same for me, then have big party with all our friends and family to celebrate it. There’s nothing wrong with spending money to throw a party for something you want to celebrate.

It entirely depends on the specific company’s policies.

The company I work for hires people through a temp-to-hire program. As a temp, you are not eligible for benefits. The moment you get hired full-time, though, you are.

I’ve also worked for companies where you have to be employed for 6 months or a year before you are eligible for benefits.

It entirely depends on the company. This is not an question anyone here can answer. You need to talk to HR.

The idea of ‘trades’, as in construction trades like electricians, plumbers, carpenters, etc, has become pretty popular recently. The idea that you can get into a trade and make a good living without going to college has taken off as a response to the “forgive college loans” push. The right will often talk about trades as “real jobs” in contrast to people who go to college, rack up a ton of debt, and get degrees in fields that aren’t high paying or don’t directly translate into jobs right-wingers can easily understand. So talking about trades is a dig at ‘college educated liberals’. Among certain segments of the right, even just mentioning trades will illicit images of big burly men working with their hands doing manual labor raking in gobs of cash and lording their superiority over unemployed, highly-educated Democratic voters with liberal arts degrees and huge college debt. It’s become a meme they can use to quickly and easily convey that idea.

This is totally separate from the type of factory work they talk about trying to bring back to America by boosting domestic manufacturing. There’s really not a lot of construction trade work in factories. The type of factory work they’re talking about are typically unskilled jobs that pay much lower than skilled construction trades. But they also promised their voters they’d be creating high paying factory jobs. As much as they enact policies which suggest the opposite, the fascists running the government can understand simple economics. They know that an iPhone (for example) isn’t going to be built in the US by workers getting paid $30/hour. They know any factory manufacturing jobs their policies might create will be as close to minimum wage as possible with no benefits, ridiculous working conditions, and extremely high turnover. But they also know they have to promise the moon to maintain their sycophantic cult.

So they just words like “tradecraft” when talking about factory jobs because it illicits the idea of high paying skilled trades, but doesn’t actually outright say it. They want people to think electrician, plumber, carpenter, HVAC tech, etc, but also the deniability to say “I never said that.” If they came out and said “trade jobs” a bunch of industry and labor people would be like “uh… there are no electricians or plumbers working on factory floors.” Instead, if they get pushback they can just say, “I didn’t say that. I said ‘tradecraft’.”

It’s just Orwellian nonsense to obscure lies.

(Note: when I say ‘unskilled’ or ‘skilled’ here, I don’t mean to imply that factory work doesn’t require specific skills that can be honed and improved. I don’t mean to imply that any rando with no experience could do the job just as well as someone with a lot of experience. I’m using the terms to refer to the amount of formal training/licensing required to do them, and their relative pay levels. ‘Unskilled’ jobs typically require no formal training outside the workplace or licensing, and typically pay lower than ‘skilled’ jobs.)

This is entirely incorrect

I mean, you see the same kind of thing with scripted television where there’s no kayfabe at all. We recently got the season finale of Daredevil Born Again, and there were all kinds of posts/comments/etc talking about how satisfying/bad ass it was to see Daredevil and Punisher beat down a bunch of cops. We all know it’s scripted fiction, but it’s still fun to watch.

Because both Houses of Congress are controlled by Republicans who are 100% in support of everything the regime is doing.

Why do polticalitcians cling to the idea that these voters can’t be reached?

They don’t. At least not the politicians who tend to do well. Reaching people who had never voted in any previous election was the central strategy to both Obama’s and Trump’s campaigns, and those were the two most successful electoral politicians in national American politics of the past 2 decades.

Because polygamy has historically been heavily associated with oppression and subjugation of women. Can it be done ethically and responsibly? Maybe in theory, but, on a broad scale, as an institution, that’s never really happened.

My kid fits in just fine. She has plenty of friends.

Right? And I’m over here failing as a parent by buying books and letting her play outside. /s

Is there really fault at play here? I mean, is playing Minecraft a life skill that’s vital for a 5 year old to learn?

Maybe I’m parenting wrong, but my 5 year old has no idea what Minecraft is, let alone knows how to play it. The only video games she’s ever played is some Super Mario Bros 3 on a vacation once. She doesn’t even know how to do anything on our iPad except use the sketchpad app for drawing.

You’re probably right, but also, is it that big of a deal? I don’t buy just a screen protector, but the phone cases always come with one. I work construction, so I like to have a pretty durable phone case. I usually buy an Otterbox or similar. They always come with a screen protector, and I’ve never had a problem putting them on correctly.

I guess I just don’t see why NOT to use a screen protector if you already have one.

This exact thing has happened many many times in history. Not someone transported through time, but someone travelling to a place where nobody (or virtually nobody) speaks the same language, or even one related to yours.

I mean, for the extremely obvious examples, before the Columbian exchange, nobody in the Old World (Eurasia/Africa) had ever encountered any New World (Americas) language and vice versa. They managed to learn how to communicate within a fairly short time period.

But this was just the most obvious example. Until relatively recently (like past half millennia, or so), it was common enough.

You’d learn through immersion. You hear the language every day all day. You try to communicate by pointing and gesturing. Pretty soon you start picking up individual words (point at a piece of bread and say ‘bread’ over and over. Someone is going to respond with their word for bread. Do that a few times and you’ll learn the word for bread, etc, etc). That builds into common phrases. Before too long, you’re able to hold very rudimentary conversations, and it just builds from there.

Good for him!

No

Did you see him drop Ohio State’s trophy the other day?

Maybe he dropped the Pope?