Yeah, for towing that’s basically useless unless you’re only using it to tow around a wood splitter or something.

That said, my family has had a 1993 Ford ranger for many years. I’m pretty sure even with the 4-cylinder engine it still has a towing capacity several times that much, but we have never towed anything with it. We have gotten a lot of use out of it as a truck though, moving furniture, camping gear, small loads of firewood, trips to the hardware store, etc.

I can also potentially see this being big for certain fleet vehicles. Growing my dad worked on a military base as a civilian in their wastewater treatment plant. Part of his job involved driving around the base once a day or so to take water samples from a couple places. The public works department had a couple small trucks, Chevy S10 I think, that he’d use for that. They got used by other public works employees, never for anything particularly heavy duty but they did occasionally tote around some bulky tools, equipment, materials, but a significant amount of what they used them for could probably have used a golf cart. I’d be amazed if those trucks went 10 miles most days, they sat most of the time, kind of a perfect sort of situation for them to sit on a charger.

I don’t really like brand favouritism, but if you’re able to find a Toyota in your price range, as far as I’m concerned it’s pretty hard to go wrong with them. I’m pretty hard-pressed to think of anyone I’ve ever known who’s had a Toyota who had anything really bad to say about them, even with the few years of Tacomas that had major rust issues around the early 2000s, everyone I know who had one felt that Toyota did a pretty solid job of doing right by them.

My current car is an '07 4runner. I bought it used with around 150k miles on it about 5 years ago, I now at just over 200k miles. and except for the usual shit like brakes that are expected to wear down every few years, the only major thing I’ve had to deal with was replacing the alternator. It does have a small exhaust leak that throws a code for the catalytic converter every so often (it’s on for maybe a couple weeks every few months or so) that I’m not particularly concerned about. I’m fairly confident that with not much beyond regular upkeep this car could make it to 300k+ pretty easily.

My wife is driving a Prius that’s a few years newer (2012 I think) she’s had it for a few years now, only thing she’s needed is new tires so far.

Growing up my mom had an '89 Corolla, and there’s a damn good chance it’s still on the road. At some point we sold it to my uncle who later sold it to a cousin, and after that we lost track of it, but around that time (circa 2010-ish) it was still going just fine, even after having a pretty large tree fall on it and all of the usual wear and tear you’d expect on a 20+ year old car.

Outside of my family’s favoritism for Toyotas, I also have a hard time thinking of people who have anything bad to say about Honda’s. I’ve also never heard anyone complain about their Subaru, I have less personal experience with Subarus overall, I’ve never driven one, but my overall impression of every one I’ve ever ridden in has been positive, and Subaru owners sing their praises.

Most people I’ve known with Kias and Hyundais have also spoken highly about them…

Overall, my general advice is buy from any of the major Asian car brands unless you need a larger pickup truck (¾ ton or bigger,) then pretty much your only options are pretty much American trucks. For ½ ton or smaller trucks, I’d personally stick to Asian brands still, with the possible exception of the Ford Maverick.

As far as specific models, my personal recommendations are

Subaru in pretty much any market segment they inhabit. Smaller sporty cars are dumb regardless of brand, but if that’s your thing, go Subaru.

Sedans/hatchbacks- Toyota Corolla or Prius, Honda Accord or civic.

Compact suvs/crossovers- Toyota RAV4, Honda CRV, Kia sportage, Hyundai Tucson. Wrangler if you actually intend to go off roading, Suzuki samurai if you’re going off roading and not in the US.

Mid-sized SUV: Toyota 4runner (I’ve dialed in that a midsized SUV is the right sized car for me personally at this point in my life, not going to go into all of the reasoning for that, but having driven a few different brands and models I am personally confident in saying that it is the be-all end-all of mid sized SUVs for me, if Isuzu ever makes a comeback in the passenger vehicle segment and resurrects the trooper I may be open to reevaluating that because I loved my trooper, but they’re all 20+ years old now)

Full-sized SUVs: do not recommend. If you can find one of the old school jeep wagoneers maybe do that for the cool factor, but if you’re contemplating a full sized SUV what you really want is a minivan, or maybe a Ford flex. They’re not “cool,” but trust me, minivans are the shit.

Minivans- they’re all pretty good, never met a minivan I didn’t like.

Small pick-up trucks- Ford Maverick, or if you need/want a “real” truck get a Tacoma or Frontier, or go for old rangers/Mazda B series or a t100 if you’re ok with an old truck, or replace all of those recommendations with a Toyota Hilux if you’re not in the US/Canada

½ ton pickup- Toyota tundra

Bigger than ½ ton- you don’t need this unless you are regularly towing a heavy trailer or live and work on a farm, or do major construction business with your personal vehicle, or something to that effect. If that applies to you, take your pick of any of the big 3 American brands, I like Fords, but honestly I view this as the same as picking your favorite color, it’s what you like personally, don’t let anyone else yuck your yum.

Personally, and I’m not saying this applies to everyone by a longshot, what car you need/want is fairly personal, but if I had carte blanche to go out and buy any newish car I could find to replace my current vehicle I’d be looking at

Toyota 4runner or Tacoma Subaru Crosstrek or Outback
Ford Maverick

But I’m an outdoorsy, DIY-minded person, who goes “off-road” occasionally (I don’t go off roading for its own sake, but my life sometimes tak me driving onto a beach, or down some shitty dirt paths, over fields, etc.) has to commute in the snow, often has to pick up bulky lumber and such, and occasionally how small trailers.

My wife who doesn’t usually have any of those needs would probably be looking at a newer Prius, or maybe a Hyundai Kona if she decided she wanted something bigger.

And in an ideal world, I’d probably have a maverick or 4runner for my various outdoorsy and DIY pursuits, and whatever the smallest cheapest DIY hybrid or electric car I can find is for my daily commuting as long as it has 4 wheels, a/c, and a radio, pretty much anything out there would be just fine for me. But I can only count on having 2 parking spaces.

Honestly at 5k in this economy, you’re probably scraping the bottom of the barrel of anything that can be considered a “good” car, and you’re probably going to just end up with whatever is available near you in your price range with relatively low miles. Go asian if you can’t but don’t expect anything amazing to present itself.

First of all, this isn’t something I support, I don’t trust literally anything this administration does, and it’s not really something I want my tax dollars spent on

But taking a step back, when I think about it, I’m a little surprised the pentagon doesn’t already have one.

Pretty much anyone who goes on TV is getting a quick once over by the hair/makeup/wardrobe people. And it’s not like they don’t host press conferences and such at the pentagon with some frequency.

And the military is all about appearances - uniforms, hairstyle regulations, polished boots, etc. If you’re putting some military bigwig in front of a camera, that’s, in part, a propaganda opportunity, so you want them to look the part

True, I did think about mentioning that but decided to skip over it to keep things simple.

Animals like cows for example, can get by almost entirely on fiber. Stuff like grass doesn’t have much in the way of carbs we can use, but it contains a ton of fiber, and cows digestive systems are set up to actually do something with them.

The extra “stomachs” they have allow for some extra fermentation and such to happen so they can break down that fiber into simpler carbs.

Gonna try to give a very general ELI5 sort of answer

There’s basically 3 main types of carbohydrates

Simple carbs- basically sugars (mono- and di-saccharides)

Complex carbs- starches, whole grains, etc. (polysaccharides)

Fiber- arguably these are just really complex carbs that your body can’t really break down

In general, sugars are the source of energy your body actually runs on, especially glucose. Everything else basically gets broken down into glucose.

Your body can pretty much use simple sugars as-is or can easily break them down into a form it can use. There’s some variation just how quick and easy it is for your body to use different sugars, but in general your body will start to feel the effects of eating sugar in the space of a few minutes, and the effects will peak within about an hour or two.

Complex carbs take a little more digesting to break down into a form your body can make use of. They’re basically being turned into simpler sugars, but that process takes a while. You might hear about athletes carbo-loading with a big spaghetti dinner or something the night before a big competition. The idea there is that the energy from that big, complex carb-heavy dinner won’t really hit them for a few hours or even until the next day, and it will keep providing that energy for a longer period of time.

Fiber is, for the most part, indigestible, your body can’t really break it down into simpler sugars that it can make use of. It goes in your mouth, through your digestive tract, and out the other end relatively unchanged. That doesn’t mean it’s useless though, it still plays an important role in digestion. It takes up space in your stomach helping you feel more full. It absorbs water and helps keep your stool soft and helps waste move through your intestines, and it minds to things like bile acids and cholesterol so that they can be passed as waste.

Again, this is meant to be a very general answer, there’s a lot of details I’m glossing over both just to keep things simple, and because I’m not a doctor or anything of the sort and I’m not 100% sure myself.

My first exposure to the word “Kafkaesque” was on the show Mission Hill, with a character complaining about how often people misuse it. I didn’t really understand what it meant, I was like 12 years old staying up late to watch it on adult swim, not quite the target audience for either the show or Kafka.

As I got older and began to understand the world better, that colored my perception a bit, I heard a lot of people use and more often misuse it, and little clips of Mission Hill played in the back of my mind.

I miss the days when everyone seemed to be misusing the word “Kafkaesque.” Now it seems like you can slap that label on just anything and it would be accurate. It’s almost hard to misuse it anymore.

Please, no meat-touching, ma’am.

I’m not looking for troubleshooting

WTH is going on with my phone? Anybody else having new problems?

That sounds a hell of a lot like a troubleshooting question. Otherwise you’re just screaming into the void and I’m not sure what kind of interaction you were looking for by posting here. I suppose we could just say “that’s rough buddy” and “yes/no, I am/am not having that problem” and move on.

His tone could use some work, but so could yours. Those are very relevant pieces of information to ask for when trying to figure out what’s wrong with your phone.

When you say it won’t loosen when turned, do you mean it’s totally seized up or it spins but the part doesn’t come off?

If it’s totally seized up, have you tried dousing it with some sort of penetrating oil? WD40 might do it a pinch, but a specialized penetrant like PB blaster or liquid wrench would probably be better.

Soaking it with some CLR or something might also help to break up and rust, lime, or other crud that might be in there.

Still won’t come loose? Get the beefiest screwdriver you can find that will fit the slot. Maybe give it a couple good love taps with a hammer and see if that helps bust it loose.

If you can find a suitable bit, an impact driver/wrench may do the trick too.

Get a big ol’ set of channel locks, vise grips, a pipe wrench, etc. that you can grab onto the screwdriver with to give you some extra leverage, and go to town.

Sometimes a little heat will do the trick, you can try hot tap water, boiling water, heat gun, and blowtorch if you’re willing to accept a bit of a risk.

If it’s spinning but you don’t seem to be making any progress

Do you have access to the back of the tub? Often there’s an access panel so you can get at the plumbing. If all else fails you can try to take the drain apart from the back/underneath

EDIT: I suspect this is part of a pop up stopper something like this- https://youtu.be/c5_o166BCDQ (not my video) just so you have some idea how this thing goes together

Edit 2: sorry I fired off a couple quick thought and this is still rolling around in the back of my head because I’m havi a slow night at work. These pop up drain stoppers are like $15. Don’t worry about breaking them too much, the whole assembly pretty much unscrews. Bust off the plastic parts and if you need to cut off the screw head, get a tub drain removal tool (also about $10 -15) try to find one that’s hollow if there’s still some screw sticking up, unscrew the whole drain and replace it.

It’s definitely the wrong vibe a lot of times, but it’s also a weird balancing act.

I like to think my county has our shit together about as well as anywhere in the country (which is admittedly a fairly low bar) We do have some other resources available to us that we try to make use of, like a mobile crisis team (which is technically some sort of private non profit entity that receives county funding and works with us and our police departmens very closely, but it’s not something that we can directly dispatch in the same way we can send police/fire/EMS)

And they do a lot of good, they go out and respond to calls from people who need their assistance, and often handle things just fine on their own.

But a lot of times we find ourselves getting calls from those teams because they went out to make contact with someone, who they spoke with and who requested their assistance, but started getting aggressive so they need police to assist them.

And I’ve been on the phone with a lot of situations that have taken some crazy turns, where it starts out sounding like a totally boring, routine call for an officer to come out and take a report or address some minor issue, and suddenly everyone is yelling, punches are being thrown, something is on fire, etc.

So in the interest of safety, a lot of non-police calls probably should still have police respond as well, they just need to strike a happy balance where they’re waiting outside or something, ready to bust in if needed, but otherwise they’re not directly involving themselves in the situation.

But overall, a whole lot of my calls would probably be best resolved if we could force people to sit down with a middle school guidance counselor and learn how to take a deep breath, count to 10, use their inside voices, and listen to each other.

I am fairly certain I fall somewhere on the autistic spectrum. Somewhere at the top end on the mild/high-functioning/low-support-needs/however-you-want-to-describe-it.

I’ve never felt a need to pursue a diagnosis, I don’t think putting it on paper and making it official has anything to offer me that’s worth the aggravation of dealing with extra doctors appointments and such to get diagnosed.

But I’ve occasionally considered doing it so that I could potentially participate in any sort of research being done that might possibly help autistic people with higher support needs. That would be worth the aggravation.

But holy fuck does this administration make me glad I never did.

I always had a little paranoia that a diagnosis would be more trouble than it’s worth beyond just the annoyance of getting diagnosed. That somewhere I’d encounter some bullshit regulation where I’d be considered mentally unfit for something, or be disqualified from a job, or just have people treating me different if they found out.

But now it’s very clear that that’s sort of the plan, where a diagnosis would probably be actively used against me instead of just being the result weird edge cases where I might slip through the cracks due to some outdated poorly worded policy.

I believe in Iceland’s case it has to do with how the Icelandic language works and certain names just kind of don’t work with the rest of the language. I’m far from an expert on the Icelandic language, but my understanding is that nouns, names included, sort of get “conjugated” (I’m not sure if “conjugation” is the correct term, I think that’s specifically a vowel thing, but it’s similar in that the word changes depending on how it’s used in a sentence and most of us are familiar with the concept of conjugation.)

There’s a few random things in English that do it, like depending on the sentence, you might use I/me/my/mine/etc. when you refer to yourself refer to yourself, but in icelandic all nouns do that in a regular predictable way, so they have to be pronounceable with certain suffixes tacked onto them.

I think they also do the old school patronymic/matronymic name thing instead of family names. So if you meet someone in Iceland whose name is something like “Steve Robertson” then “Robertson” isn’t his family name, his dad is literally named “Robert” and so he is “Steve, Robert’s Son” so names kind of have to work with that kind of naming convention as well.

So it’s less of a “this name is stupid” and more of a “this name breaks our language”

It also seems like they’ve eased up on some of the rules in recent years, first names are no longer gender restricted, and they’ve added a nonbinary suffix for the patronyms/matronyms so now you can be a -bur instead of just -son or -dóttir

I have a friend who’s grandfather was a chemist who at least claimed to his family that he mixed up small batches of DDT for mosquito control on his property.

I have no way of verifying that, but I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if some rogue chemist with a vendetta against mosquitos was out there doing it.

I overall agree that the concerns are overblown and sometimes outright fake, and that artificial colors aren’t inherently any more dangerous than any other ingredient

I also agree that Kennedy and his ilk are really using this as a smokescreen for all the other bullshit they’re up to

That said, I’m largely in favor of banning artificial dyes.

Pretty much the only purpose they serve is to make unhealthy processed junk food more attractive, so I think we should be discouraging that.

There is some evidence that some artificial dyes may be harmful in some ways. In the grand scheme of hazardous chemicals I’m expected to in my life they’re near the bottom of the list of things I’m concerned about, probably falling somewhere in between alcohol and grilled meat (neither of which I’m planning to cut out of my diet anytime soon, but I also enjoy those things so I’m more willing to accept the risk, I’m pretty ambivalent about whether or not my food is exactly the right color)

I work in 911 dispatch, a lot of my coworkers are predictably bootlickers.

I can’t even tell you how many calls we get all day everyday where we’re all just left scratching our head going “Why did you call 911,about this? This isn’t a police issue.” But since usually the only tool we have in our toolbox is police, that’s what we end up having to send.

But they’ll balk at any suggestion that maybe our police don’t need a new armored truck and a new police station, and whatever other stupid shit they’re spending tax dollars on, and instead maybe we should spend that money to beef up our mental health services, public works, homeless outreach, animal control, code enforcement, and other services that we could be providing instead of just sending police out to deal with non-police issues.

Luckily, my local police are pretty good as far as police go, not too trigger happy, generally make a decent effort to handle mental health issues carefully, they usually manage to not make things significantly worse, though they often don’t do much to improve the situation either.

In a sort of abstract sense, there are some parallels.

In a system like the US, corporations and those with a lot of money hold a lot of power, and unionization is a way for everyone else to take some power for themselves to make sure that their voices are heard.

In a system like China however, most of that power is instead concentrated with the government and upper echelons of party, so attempts at democratizing fill a similar role of giving regular people a voice.

There’s a lot of nitty gritty details, cultural differences, etc. and I don’t really want to gloss over those, but the root in either case is common people organizing and trying to make sure their voices are heard.

I work in 911 dispatch, so this is going to depend a bit on if we’re counting incidents that we’ve handled as dispatchers, or if we’re only counting incidents that physically happened at our dispatch center.

For the former, I’m going to just leave it at- we’ve handled a little bit of everything. If you can imagine it we’ve probably had something similar happen. I’m not going to go into any detail because our craziest incidents would probably be googleable and point you to my workplace.

Limiting it to things that happened here, we had one of the local crazies call in a bomb threat to our dispatch center. We weren’t taking it too seriously, he’s a known party and mostly harmless, but out of an abundance of caution our breaks were postponed while the sheriffs swept our building.

Our dispatch center shares a big campus with the county prison, and a few other county offices and facilities, we’re at the end of a long hilly driveway/private road with a guard shack at the top and the driveway for a few neighboring businesses branching off from it. It’s not totally uncommon for various people to be walking up our driveway, people from those other businesses out for a walk, people going to visit an inmate at the prison, the occasional person with business at one of those county offices, etc.

Anyway, one day one of my coworkers is driving into work and sees an older guy walking up the driveway, the weather was pretty shitty that day, so he decides he’s going to be nice and give him a lift up to the guard shack. He comes into work and by the time he’s logged in there was a call for a disturbance at the guard shack, the old guy was some sovereign citizen type trying to pull some first amendment audit bullshit at the prison. So we all got a memo about not giving anyone rides.

Shortly before I started, there was a small fad of people making s’mores in the lunch room microwave. One of the newer trainees was a younger guy, still lived at home, was a little clueless, and decided to make himself a s’more. He microwaved it way too long and smoked up the building, it was probably about as close as they’ve ever gotten to having to evacuate to our backup center. So we now have a “no s’mores” rule.

There was also one new guy that honestly probably shouldn’t have made it through our background checks who was a real piece of work. He is probably the only person in living memory to use the shower here, we suspect he may have been living out of his car. He had some weird shit on his record, some strange domestic bullshit, he was a volunteer firefighter and had been in trouble a few times for trying to pull people over with the lights on his personal vehicle (basically impersonating an officer) and was just generally a really strange dude. He nearly got into a fist fight with his trainer and that was the final straw. There’s been a few other weird stories involving him since we got rid of him but those are pretty googleable.

English, French, Spanish, Esperanto

As a bonus: binary, hexadecimal, octal (really most bases but I can only go past that up to hexatrigesimal without looking up the symbols) Roman numerals, tally marks

I work in 911 dispatch, a lot of the 10 digit non emergency lines also redirect to our center, we get a lot of wrong numbers calling into us

One of those numbers is just one digit off from a pizza place, which is always fun because once in a while someone is a domestic calls in pretending to order pizza because they don’t want the person they’re with to know they’re calling police, so we kind of have to grill those calls with are you having an emergency/do you know you’re calling the police/are you safe to talk kind of questions

Pro tip for anyone who finds themselves in a situation like that, most dispatch centers are aware of those types of calls, but some posts online will tell you that there’s a code that pepperoni = they have a gun or something like that. No such code exists, at least not in any way that’s universally recognized. Maybe some departments have that standardized but it certainly wasn’t part of my training.

I work a weird sche, 2 on, 2 off, 3 on and then the next week it flips. So every other week working friday-sunday, or I’m off those days.

An the one hand I support this because 3 day weekends are fucking great and everyone should have them

On the other hand, I have a feeling that would change my schedule to 2-2-4, and while 4 day weekends are even better than 3 days, I’d probably be stuck working 4 days in a row on my working weekends

Well we do have an emergency, the catch is that the emergency is the person implementing the tariffs.