I’m going to disagree with everyone here. Loads of people throughout history have learned to swim by literally being thrown in. It’s not a good way to learn, but people do it. Even babies can do it.
Given a little bit of reading first, you’d do just fine. Yeah, the motions might be a little off cause it’s hard to learn a complex movement from a book, but it would be good enough.
I’m not sure. I know in a lot of those places, the rationale is that the terrain is too flat, so rifle bullets can travel too far.
The problem is that I don’t know if that actually corresponds to increased risk of death. It sounds plausible, but idk if there are real stats to back it up.
A quick search for some plausible data turned up California’s official stats, and going back a few years, I never saw more than 5 deaths in a year. Extrapolating the rate to the whole US, that’s like 50 per year. Other sources just say “less than 100 per year for the whole US”.
Without a specific study, it’s just as plausible to attribute the fatalities to sheer proximity of the shooter to the victim rather than bullets traveling far. Bigger targets are easier to hit. Just looking at the California data, which includes injuries, this seems to bear out, and most injuries and fatalities are due to close range shotgun bird hunting (i.e. the Dick Cheney).
And really, if you wanted to completely eliminate the risk of rifle bullets traveling further than intended, you could mandate the use of any elevated shooting position (which some places do for archery).
Here’s an example: Delaware only allows shotgun, pistol/pistol caliber long guns, and muzzleloader, no true rifle.
https://www.eregulations.com/delaware/hunting/deer-seasons
Connecticut only allows rifle on private land.
https://portal.ct.gov/deep/hunting/2025-connecticut-hunting-and-trapping-guide/deer-hunting#PVSHOT
Iowa has no rifle allowed.
https://www.iowadnr.gov/things-do/hunting-trapping/iowa-hunting-seasons
Lots of states have restrictions against modern (and by modern, i mean bottlenecked) rifle rounds, and if you want to use a rifle, you have to either find a 150 year old cowboy gun, or buy a really expensive new gun using one of several specialized cartridges that cost like $2 a round.
And then when it comes down to it, if you live in a state where it is legal to hunt with a regular rifle, you end up finding that half the time any public land that you can hunt on is restricted to archery only, so unless you happen to be a large landowner, you can’t hunt with a rifle.
There are a lot of differences between how the US and how Australia do hunting. For one, there is no commercial deer/elk harvest in the US. Commercially sold venison can only be from farmed deer/elk. I think deer leather can be sold, but there are a lot of hoops to go through.
Also, in the US, most hunting regulations exist not for ethical or conservation purposes but to prevent people from being able to subsistence hunt. They wanted hunting to be a rich man’s game like in the UK. The existence of hunting seasons is a good example. Another is regulations on method of take; for example, you often must use outdated equipment like bows and muzzleloaders, and the use of modern, effective rifles is severely curtailed. Compare that to Australia where you can use night vision/thermal scopes and rifles with supressors, and i believe there is no “hunting season”.
The reality is that both countries have an overpopulation of large herbivores in areas, and the answer anti-hunting people give is the reintroduction of large carnivores. While we should do that in more rural areas, it’s not feasible in urban/suburban areas where deer proliferate.
Many municipalities actually have to pay to have deer culled, and they do that rather than making it easier for people to hunt.
Tl;dr, i think there are some things I like better about how Australia handles hunting, but theres also things about the US’s method i like.
Yeah, as someone with some all-clad, it’s really nothing special. I heard that the handles are geared towards maintaining the ability to prevent twisting of the pan in your hand while using pot holders/towels, and i think they work well for that.
I strongly agree with this. You aren’t necessarily going to get fancy brand names, but you can get a stainless frying pan with a big billet of aluminum on the bottom for heat distribution for $20. Spending 5 times that amount basically just gets you a mirror finish, a brand name, and the ability to put it in a dishwasher (and who does that with pans?).
Carbon steel pans are another one. You shouldn’t need to spend more than $10 on a carbon steel pan. The materials are cheap and they can be easily mass produced. There’s nothing that should make it expensive.
pH doesn’t necessarily tell the right story if you are concerned about acidity for your teeth, GI tract, or taste. Something like distilled water will turn acidic with a pH of 5.8 due to co2 absorption. There’s barely any “acid” there, though, it just doesn’t have any buffering capability compared to water with some dissolved solids in it (like tap water). What really matters is what they call “titratable acidity”.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-45776-5_22
But you don’t call it “point four five caliber” you call it “forty five caliber”. Similar is 7.62 mm AKA “thirty caliber”. It’s reasonable that someone wouldn’t know that it’s literally just hundredths of inches.
Shotgun gauge is wonky, so it’s not a given that the number would just be a diameter in units they are familiar with. “Grains” are also a meaningless unit to most people.
Yeah, the focus the landscaping part is weird. It seems more relevant to me that 5 years ago, he was in high school, rather than that he did landscaping.
Seriously, I think a big part of solarpunk ethos is combating the notion that everything has to always be available 24/7. Society pays a lot to deliver every convenience like fruit out of season from the other side of the world.
Generally, when you want to heat the beer is after fermentation has peaked. Higher temps means faster fermentation (obviously to a point), and fermentation generates heat (positive feedback loop), which is why you need to cool beer through the initial stages of fermentation). After peak though, the temperature drops and causes a positive feedback loop downwards. This means that your beer really crawls to the finish line. Your beer might be 90% done after 3 days, but then take a couple weeks for that last 10%.
Another benefit is if you are bottling the beer, you need to know how much sugar to add. Calculators ask for the beer temperature post fermentation to determine residual CO2. With a dropping temperature, it’s hard to say what that point is, and if fermentation is just stalled, not complete, you could have residual fermentation sugar. Bumping the temperature up at the end solves both problems.
I also second adding a fan. No need for anything crazy, just something little to move the air. I used a old computer case fan wired to a random DC charger from the “miscellaneous chargers” bin at the thrift store: just make sure the voltage works with the fan.
Moisture can be an issue when you are keeping a fridge above the designed set temperature, but below ambient. I just keep a long sock filled with silica beads in mine. To recharge, I can just pop it in a low oven. They sell devices to do this (evadry is the brand name), but you might get literally 20x less silica for the convenience of a case and built in heating element.
The last paragraph is a good catch. Someone from outside the US is not going to catch the difference between “a Wisconsin state senator” and “a senator from Wisconsin”.
It’s such an easy thing to predict happening, too. If you did it perfectly, it would, at best, maintain an unstable equilibrium and just keep the same output quality.
To me, there isn’t too much difference between brands. Fully clad pans will be dishwasher safe, but I never put pans in the dishwasher, anyway.
I bought some of my first stainless pans from a restaurant supply store, and they were really cheap, but worked well. They basically have a big aluminum disk fused to the stainless part that contacts food. It heats really evenly, but it’s not dishwasher safe.
I also have some All-clad pans. They are expensive, but you can get them on good sales (also, rich people buy big sets of them cause they are shiny and expensive but then donate them to a thrift store when they realize that they don’t know how to cook on stainless steel). Honestly, they are just fine. The handles are weirdly uncomfortable. They make a mirror finish on the outside or a brushed finish. I like the brushed better because there’s no way someone who actually uses them can keep a mirror finish looking good.
They make a 3 ply and a 5 ply (and even a 7 ply). The 3 and 5 ply are the same thickness overall, and theoretically the 5 ply should be more warp resistant, but i don’t know that it should really ever be a problem. I think the higher ply pans are also heavier, so they probably hold more heat, too.
Realistically, I think the only things that matter to me are that it’s oven safe and induction capable.
I’ve used this, too, and it was great. They also tell you if it’s something actually scratch/dent or if it’s just the box that got mangled so they can’t put it on a store shelf.
Total War: Empire. I’ve previously played Rome 1/2, Medieval 1/2, and Atilla. For anyone who’s played other total war games, there are a couple of game mechanics that are new in Empire.
There are actual naval battles, where you put ships into a battle line, and you can board enemy ships. It’s cool but hard (for me) to control. Also many of the buildings in a territory aren’t located in the capital because it’s meant to represent colonial holdings, so you can have a sugar plantation or something outside the protection of a city, and a lot of the warfare ends up being small skirmishes sacking outlying buildings.
The new campaign missions seem a lot longer than what I remembered of the original campaigns. I like that they tutorials now give you some strategy, too.
One of my friends had their water hookups backwards, too, and they had no clue until I checked after they complained to me about how all their clothes were shrinking despite only ever washing on cold and hang drying. Sounds like a nice feature to have a sensor in there.
I’ve definitely got a soft spot for any electromechanical appliances. Computers have gotten so cheap that every appliance built now runs on them, but it’s much harder (for me, at least) to do anything about it when one stops working.
My chest freezer stopped working, and i was able to put in a new relay for $2. The circuit diagram made it easy to diagnose with a multimeter. Oddly enough, i had to buy a 10 pack, so i likewise have a bunch of spares I’ll never need.
My dishwasher stopped working, and the manual specifically showed which wires to connect to to test resistance of each component to see if anything needed to be replaced. It turned out that the float was gunked up, so it read as having enough water even though it didn’t.
My fridge ice maker stopped working, and I just had to stick in a jumper wire to put it through a test cycle that immediately made it clear what was going wrong (a short), and i was able to fix it.
This is all in contrast to my clothes washer that runs on a computer, and it gives me an error message that basically just means “it’s not draining right”, and there’s like 8 potential causes, and I’ve tried to address them all, but it’s still get the error message.
Yeah, it’s really frustrating when someone with higher body fat that floats like a cork tries to tell you how to do it.
Technique can’t overcome density. I will say that I got slightly better at it after learning to SCUBA dive (or maybe I just got fatter). In scuba, you move up and down in the water column by adjusting the range of your breathing. You basically try to get your neutrally boyant setpoint at 50% lung capacity. To go down, you try to control your breathing from 0-50% and to go up, you breathe from 50-100%. It made me slightly better at keeping my lungs really topped up with air.
To float, I basically have to hold my lungs at max capacity, and then exhale-inhale as fast as possible, which is unnatural and takes concentration. I usually have to use my arms for a little bit of upward thrust through that breath.
There’s no lungs in my legs, so those will sink no matter what. People claim you can “use your core” or some other BS to keep your legs afloat, but the fact of the matter is that if your upper body is positively buoyant and your lower body is negatively buoyant, there will be a rotational moment pulling your legs down, and it can only be counteracted by external application of force (i.e., kicking your feet). I can either float on my back with a mild amount of kicking, or i can do like a face-in-water deadman float, and just pull my head out of the water occasionally to quickly breathe.