I’m not vegan or even vegetarian, not try to cut back diary generally. We have used Planet Oat oatmilk creamer for the last couple years and really like it. It is certified vegan for those that look for that. It has the right consistency to replace normal dairy creamers pretty well and tastes good. There’s a variety of flavors if you go for that as well.

Honestly, the majority of key points to talk about can be found online from respectable sources (for example, this article from Johns Hopkins, though there are many others). There is a better than even chance he has shady looked up the “Is this normal” stuff himself if he has normal internet access.

From a social standpoint it’s going to be different for everyone, teenage years are hard and kids are often cruel. I’d advise to just be there for him on this front, but don’t be pushy. He is going to be moody, lash out sometimes, and act differently. That is all normal. He is going to want to push boundaries and get in trouble (rather do things that will get him in trouble, most folks don’t actually want to get in trouble). Give him safe room to explore who he is and to try new things without letting him fall down too hard.

Lastly, you say there are no trusted male figures in your life, but that doesn’t have to be family. Good friends can also fill that space. I have to imagine there is some guy in your life that could have heart to heart, even just with you to then talk to your son. It’s worth trying to broaden your expectation of what a trusted male figure is perhaps.

I think this is a huge part of it but there is certainly a lot of nuance here. We have a phenomenally funded, equipped, and trained military, but in the last 20 years it’s been shown to be only moderately effective at addressing the threats in the world that have a small fraction of the resources our military does with few exceptions (naval might is probably the largest of those exceptions). So even problems we think we should be able to solve we barely can.

There is also large and growing wealth disparity which drives the tribalism deeper and makes many folks dig their heels in to positions that just aren’t based in reality (see anti-vaccine and lockdown sentiment around COVID as but one example). Couple this with the majority of Americans being truly terminally online and being stuck in echo chambers that just further ingrain the basis they hold and it causes a lot of vocal Americans online to lash out irrationally.

I would like to offer OP a view that we aren’t all like this though. For many of us our incoming government, the corrupt people they are tagging to lead our various institutions, the incomprehensibly rich heads of various companies, and the brainwashed cults that worship them all are sources of deep shame. I can only speak for myself, but my friends, close coworkers, and even a few of my family all feel this way. Please don’t write off all Americans because of the loud, obnoxious jerks you have to see in many places, some of us are pretty decent people that really want to make the world a better place and help everyone we can.

I mean this is technically right (so the best kind of right) but as someone that got okay grades in school and only passed because I could ace a test on pretty much anything, knowing I had ADHD before I was in my mid 30s, stressing over why work was getting harder and harder and trying to explain to my wife that i genuinely just forget to clean up after a project is done would have been hugely helpful. So diagnosing ADHD in kids and teens getting good grades may end with just therapy as treatment if they are otherwise doing well, knowing that other treatments (like medication) are options if after school they start struggling more. Keep in mind it’s much more difficult to get an ADHD diagnosis as an adult than as a kid.

Integza does mostly rocket engineering videos but is very good. 12Tone does music analysis (which I didn’t think I’d be interested in but it’s actually super interesting)

Minute Physics is great as well for general physics in bite size chunks.

What If is by Randall Monroe of XKCD where he answers ridiculous questions using science and math to give serious (if crazy) answers.

BPS.Space builds rockets and is very good at explaining the why of what he’s doing.

Mark Rober is good and hits at about a high school level general science and engineering.

Thought Emporium does mostly bioengineering but ventures into a verity of topics.

Legal Eagle is good at US based law topics.

I will 100% vouch for Nebula. It’s a great service that also directly supports creators more than YouTube does. You can find many educational YouTubers there.

Interesting fact. OBDII is a CARB requirement, so it’s tied to cars that must meet emissions standards. This is why Teslas don’t need to include one (ands it likely other manufacturers will stop including them in their electric models at some point as well). No emissions systems to check means no need for an OBDII port.

Perhaps for you, but for millions of Americans it no longer did. I mean I don’t disagree with you, but the reality is the increased presence and technology of airport screening is mainly an economic force to keep folks flying. The average American doesn’t really understand it frankly care that TSA doesn’t increase security in relation to the costs and hassle (and I’m not talking about the folks that ask questions like OP, or give TSA agents a hard time in line, or even uncle crazy that we all ignore at Thanksgiving as he rants about how mmWave machines give us all cancer, I’m talking about the folks that just grumble a little about how long it takes the once or twice a year they fly, then forget about it again, the 80% fliers).

So many have noted how the TSA is security theater, and even explained why it’s so bad, but I want to offer some reasoning as to why it’s still worth it. In a nutshell, it makes passengers feel safer. We all know that TSA is mostly useless at actually stopping a motivated threat. It’s really only good for stopping poorly planned or spontaneous threats which are generally uncommon in air transit. But for the general masses, that intrusive security screening feels thorough and so people assume their flights are safe and continue to fly all over the country. This keeps airlines in business, taxes going to localities and states from their airports, and creates a ton of jobs from gate agents to coffee shop clerks to rental car agents and beyond. The minute people stop thinking air travel is generally safe and secure is when all of that collapses. So we pour money into theater to make things look and feel secure (though most of the effort to actually secure things is behind the scenes, DHS/FBI/CBP/etc. using threat intel to stop planned attacks long before TSA would ever need to interact with anyone).

To your second question, we don’t really know if it scares away threat actors, but it likely does to some extent. It preps passengers to be somewhat more alert that they are in a secured area past the checkpoints, and complicates planning attacks at a minimum. No security system is 100% effective, especially one that needs to work at scales like TSA does, but the theater isn’t really an accident and for sure TSA heads know that’s all it really is, and they are fine with that.

Lastly, it’s not just the US with screenings like this, flying through Heathrow in the UK was just as bad in every way.

We don’t, we separate into bulky clothes (sweats, jeans, heavy shirts), everything else, and delicates. We wash with only cold water (modern machines and detergents don’t need hot water and it won’t get things any more clean, it just wastes energy). Bulky goes in first, then normal, then delicates. I’ve done this for at least 10 years with zero issues across a variety of machines and water hardnesses.

Add in the congress critters from both houses need to run their own campaigns at some point, in many cases they can’t afford to just kiss the ring. This is especially true in the house where seats are up for grabs “soon” and the voter base is relatively small. If you’re a Representative and won your seat on a small margin, you clearly don’t have a mandate and need to act more moderate. Some senate seats are in the same boat (McCormick in PA, assuming the recount still favors him, is in this boat; he’s run three times now and barely beat out Casey this time, it’s a fair bet he doesn’t have solid footing for his first term and can only toe the party line so far). The only thing we should all bet on is at the end of the day everyone in politics is going to lookout for themselves first. It’s going to be a shitshow for at least the next two years, probably the full four and maybe beyond.

In theory at least it’s because you pay for a specific bandwidth for home internet (the size of the pipe) but a specific amount of data for cellular (how much stuff you can get through a fixed sized pipe).

Home internet is a little unique in that way, almost all other utilities are consumption based with no real tiers in terms of how it’s delivered (you pay for the volume of water or gas you use, electricity is the same, just different units).

Networking equipment gets more expensive based on the bandwidth it supports, but it doesn’t much care how many bits you push through it. So ISPs charge based on their capacity to deliver those bits, and provide tiers at different price points. Cellular though is much more bandwidth constrained due to the technologies (and it used to be much more so before LTE and 5G), so it didn’t makes sense to charge you for slow or slower tiers. Instead the limiting factor is the capacity of a tower so by limiting data to small amounts it naturally discourages use. That model carried forward even now that the technologies support broadband speeds in some cases. As such and ISP could provide the biggest pipe (highest speed) to all homes and just charge based on consumption (they used to in the days of dial up, and satellite before starlink always has). Many ISPs instead are now double dipping though and charging for both.

In addition, all the secured loans they take make them look on paper as though they are deeply in debt and that debt then is a tax write off. This further lowers their tax brackets so they pay even less. Add to this that in the US at least only income is taxed, all of the stocks, options, and other assets they hold are non-taxable since they aren’t cash; technically their value can (and does) change regularly and they can become worthless just as easily as they can gain value and so it was determined they aren’t income since nothing is realized until they are sold.

In case you’re looking for something more white collar, I have found working for government prime contractors to be a sweet spot. I know, it feels gross to work for “the man” or to be the ones taking in those tax dollars, but hear me out.

The work is well defined, they are very often unionized, even the office staff, and it’s essentially guaranteed employment as long as you want to work there. I’ve also found that putting in what I consider pretty normal levels of effort is highly rewarded because often the bar is pretty low by those that have been in the various companies for decades that no longer care. As long as you guard against professional apathy and keep driving yourself to do the best you can, it’s can be a great sector to work in.

I would suggest looking for ones you don’t already know the names of though (often small subsidiaries of the larger companies are fine). Battelle for instance operates almost all of the DoE national labs and I hear from colleagues they are a good company with labs all over the country that need scientists, engineers, accountants, IT pros, facility folks, etc.

Here’s a gifted version, I think it still asks you to login but it’s not paywalled

https://wapo.st/3zKhYRV

That indeed looks like exactly what they are, which I should have known since I have a bunch of UniFi gear at home. I wonder what PennDOT is using them for.

I had no idea this factory was there and I live literally 5 minutes from Turtle Creek. I think more stories from media highlighting places like this that’s are often in people’s backyards can only help more folks see how the IRA helps their local communities, it’s not just some nebulous thing that only exists in news stories then.

These are small cell antennas, generally used for mmWave 5G due to the poor penetration the high frequency signals have or to increase capacity of a network where a lot of devices are used in a small space (places like stadiums, airports, city centers, etc) in which case they may have LTE antennas as well. They usually cover about a city blocks worth of area so you’ll see them spaced much like you describe.

The box on the ground is the actual radio and power supplies with the antennas behind the shroud on the pole. You’ll sometimes also see the radio cabinet mounted about 1.5m up the pole so it’s off the ground.

Source: a company I used to work for installed these (Crown Castle).

No, and there genuinely can’t be due to everything NOAA does. I used to work in the engineering group for NWS and there are so many parts to weather prediction and climate recording it’s not even funny. Sure there are satellites and radar, but there’s also over 200 weather balloons released each day across the US, there’s highly specialized software that fills the unique non-profit driven mission of the NWS, there’s advanced weather modeling run on super computers, there’s a whole network of thousands of volunteer observers that record temperature, dew point, soil temps, evaporation readings, and more to support agriculture, and then there’s the outreach both to places like schools but also to support things like amateur radio clubs and weather enthusiast clubs that all provide free observations and reports. Private industry consumes all of that data for free to repackage and sell as a product (they technically add value by tailoring it in many cases or use it to run proprietary models). All of that is just the NWS as well, NOAA does so much more that impacts everything from agriculture to fisheries and it’s so clear that the hard right pushing P2025 have no clue what they actually do. This single move would likely destroy the US position as a global breadbasket, and it’s just one tiny piece of P2025.

So the plan is to request an early ballot, then to take it to your polling place and assume the poll workers won’t follow the process and then you’ll take a picture of your early ballot to somehow own the libs? At least in PA the poll worker will just have you relinquish the unmarked early ballot and then you’ll vote as normal. If you don’t have your ballot then you vote a provisional ballot that is only counted once it’s confirmed your early ballot wasn’t returned. It’s not a hard thing and it’s well understood by poll workers on what to do.

Or you can use something like Squarespace or Wix and have a fully functioning website with everything you need in a few hours and start monetizing your views with ads. Both start at $16 a month so it’s a larger hill to climb sure but you get custom branding and don’t have to deal with the baggage of a Medium page (largely that it’s considered in many circles an untrustworthy source for pretty much any topic mainly because of how easy and barrier free it is to write there. They also have a pretty well established history of working to screw over contributors to profit off of your work including you automatically giving a full license to medium for everything you post).

If all you want is a newsletter though without a webpage to back it you can setup something in mailchimp with a custom domain (.coms start at about $10 from cloudflare). Again an hour or so of reading and configuring and you’re on your way, with an Adsense account you can even embed inline ads to your newsletter.