A relative gifted me a really ugly tree ornament. I don’t put up a Christmas tree and haven’t ever in my adult life. Relative knows this and delivered it alongside comments about me needing to get a tree and get more into the “religious” spirit of the holiday.
Normally I would at least look to donate or something I don’t want, but ugly, religious proselytizing junk goes in the trash.
I was gifted a fancy-schmancy whiskey aged in port wine casks. It’s delicious but I’m allergic to something in it. The warmth of the whiskey quickly turned into burning and itching.
Better than as a presidential candidate and now Trump acolyte.
He got credit for navigating the city post-9/11. Which, ok, I think just about any semi-talented politician with a PR team would come out of that wrapped in a patriotic halo effect.
He discouraged going after undocumented immigrant students in schools, but pushed broken window policing tactics that disproportionally affected the same undocumented immigrants and people of color.
He seemed ok with protections and benefits for domestic partnerships (this was before gay marriage was legal) but also pushed for a school voucher system that would build up private and religious schools that were very clear and open about discriminating against LGBT people.
He was undoubtedly corrupt. But no more corrupt than any predecessor. So mixed bag compared to his peers and bad compared to the sort of politician I wish could be elected in a place like NYC.
I can’t claim to represent anyone other than myself. I use an RSS feeder for news, articles, and webcomics. I have some ebooks from the library downloaded. I have been playing an MMO phone game for the last ~year and check on that a couple times a day. Discord. Lemmy has replaced reddit for me but I don’t spend as much time on it as I used to on reddit.
Our bodies need some trace metals, problem is it can’t differentiate between metals it needs and metals that will kill it. “Hell yeah, delicious zinc” as it noms down on lead instead of pooping it out.
I asked my cousins who are in high school. They don’t seem to be fed as much moral panic bullshit as I was. People who smoke marijuana aren’t doomed to hell, drug users aren’t all “worthless” welfare drags. It goes hand in hand with the improved education they are getting on mental health and addiction.
The main scare push sounds to be around drugs of unknown provenance. Like, don’t take unknown pills offered to you at a party where you can be whisked away by a stranger once you drop unconscious. Or die a painful death due to dirty drugs cut with who knows what.
Their school has Narcan doses in the med station.
Our town used to have a needle program but current leadership tipped back more conservative and they got rid of those types of programs. My cousins think that’s bullshit; they are well aware of the low efficacy of abstinence-only programs.
I asked them if they knew about the old D.A.R.E. program of the 80s and 90s. One had a decent idea of what it was, the other thought it was a meme; she had only ever seen ~millenial-aged casual drug users wear D.A.R.E T-shirts so she thought the whole thing was meant to be ironic.
For context, I grew up in the Midwest, middle school and high school from the late 90s into the early 00s. The referenced cousins and I live in New England now.
Around two years old, my mom fell and went into really early labor with my baby brother. Ambulance taking her away, lots of scared adults, I don’t have any other memories for a good two years after that one.
Is it? It’s ok to get a second opinion from other dentists.
If their current position isn’t causing you pain or tooth/jaw wear problems, then straightening them is a cosmetic decision. And if you didn’t even realize they were that crooked until the dentist suggested straightening them, then the cosmetic aspect hasn’t been bothering you.
In my country (US), dentistry is notorious for upselling unnecessary cosmetic procedures.
For example, I went to a new dentist and he found two “developing” cavities he wanted to proactively drill out and fill and a “flaw in the enamel” he could fix with a veneer. I thought that was weird since I have never had a cavity before in my life and the “enamel flaw” was cosmetic only and never bothered me. I went to another dentist for a second opinion and she told me my teeth were fine. 5 years later and those “developing” cavities never formed.
Feedly. I’ve looked around for alts, especially when Feedly started embedding sponsored articles amongst my subscriptions, but haven’t found anything I like better.
First, I get that you note “Child” 1 thru 7 to indicate offspring. Really, they’re adults though and I start my framing as such.
Adults are responsible for their decisions. Working gig jobs instead of a more traditional job, ethical issues, accepting jobs they aren’t suitable for or which have low/no compensation are all factors adults would have to consider.
The only person who seems to be obviously struggling despite decent planning and actioning (based on minimal descriptions provided) is child 1. Even that logic is tenuous depending on how long they’ve been attempting and failing in one industry while another is potentially a better fit for them that for some reason, ego or other, that they won’t consider. The rest are employed, with situation and compensation consciously accepted by each.
And I would also consider a human relationship element. If I have strong reason to believe giving all to one person would turn the other six against them in the form of lawsuits or violence, I might consider skipping inheritance altogether and give it to some charity. I suppose the amount of money and reason it can’t be split into multiple portions would also play a part in that decision.
Second from final thought, I do have a lot of siblings. Not quite seven but close. If our parents were to say, “hey, we only have enough money to give one person a meaningful inheritance, what should we do?”, I am confident nearly all of us would ask that they give it to the youngest who is still working through college and drowning in student debt. The rest of us have made our decisions on education and careers pursued, jobs accepted, lifestyle balanced with ability to support it. Not the spirit of your rigid scenario, but just pointing out another way of approaching the issue that was bricked out in the setup.
And final thought. Toss the rigid scenario aside and jobs/salary are not how I would hope to decide to divide assets among inheritors. I hope I have relationships with all my future offspring that go beyond simple sum of dollars.
That’s fair. Had an opportunity to use “e.g.” today but just said “for example” instead.
I had another interesting one. Reviewing a document someone else wrote that said an old thing was “grandfathered” in and the document didn’t apply to it. A Chinese-american coworker (who has been speaking English for decades) didn’t know that one, “grandfathered”. Another unnecessary term when “previously approved” or “previously authorized” would be so much clearer.
This is all reminding me of a Wikipedia article I stumbled on ages ago about people who want English kept “pure” to Germanic and early modern English roots. …m.wikipedia.org/…/Linguistic_purism_in_English. E.g. (lol), saying birdlore instead of ornithology, and bendsome instead of flexible.