New England has some frightfully short on-ramps. They are bad even when there isn't ice on the road. Construction can make the situation even worse; once I saw an on-ramp that had a stop sign and then met the road at an angle that my fading memory recalls to have been roughly 45 degrees.

On the other hand, some states are just fast. Texas officially does 85 MPH now. Lots of places unofficially do 90 MPH. Massachusetts is an unofficially fast state, and also in New England.

I'd need 2 of the Prius V, so make that 20 mpg. Imperial gallons? Probably that is 16 mpg in the USA.

I might even need 2 of the Excursion. It depends on vehicle options, future-proofing, and the need to carry the groceries. There are companies that modify them limo-style to have 14 or 20 seats.

I keep hearing about farmer's markets being better than supermarkets, and it simply isn't true.

Is your "supermarket" some low-end discount place that caters exclusively to the poor? There is one place that that near me. I never shop there. There are indications: They don't offer bags or they charge you for them, and they won't help you out to your car. Cans are dented. They sell junk food and soul food, but not a full selection of fruits and vegatables. The store has signs that offer to send money to other countries. Uh, to mention an awkward issue, the shoppers are more likely to be obese and black.

The place I go to will always ask if I want paper or plastic, and always ask if I want help getting my stuff to the car. The place I shop at offers minimally processed meat. They sell USA-grown rabbit. They sell tomatos on the vine. They sell bags of super-ripe indoor-grown tomatos. They stock goose, star fruit, at least a half dozen kind of pears including Asian pears, shiitake mushrooms, a full selection of organic stuff, etc. You can get non-rotting fresh fish, or you can get minimally-processed (no phosphates or carbon monoxide or colorings) frozen fish. You can get live lobsters and shellfish. You can get European-style Mars bars, both Marmite and Vegemite, german pasta (spaetzle), german bread (rye), and French jam/jelly. You can get tortillas with just 5 ingredients, all simple and natural, or you can get ones loaded with omega-3 fatty acids and fiber.

The differences are like night and day. If your supermarket sucks, find a better one. Look for a wealthy suburban zip code and go there.

Getting a proper diet actually makes the problem worse. Low-calorie foods (vegetables and anything with fiber) take up more space. Juice that is not-from-concentrate takes more space than frozen concentrate, which in turn takes more space than powdered drink mix.

The same with excercise. It makes the problem worse because you need more food if you don't sit on your butt all day.

BTW, the biggest engine you can get in a 4x4 for a full-size family is 6 L. This is for the 2013 GMC Savana Passenger Van. You can only get 5.3 L with the Chevy Express AWD. This is barely acceptable for a 3-ton vehicle with 15 seats.

getting there soonish

We're in serious trouble if nerds don't reproduce. I'm doing my part to not let the world be overrun by non-nerds. Don't neglect your duty.

No, he meant fuck. A gas guzzling fuck is kind of like 69, but connected to the source of gas. Some people find it works better if they eat beans or cabbage beforehand.

You still don't have much of a family. If the kids leave home at age 18 and don't come back, an unimpressive rate of 1 kid every other year should get you to about 9 kids. With decent performance you can have 15 kids. Again, this is assuming they leave the nest at 18 and don't come back.

This is old news for Catholics, Mormons, Muslims, and Orthodox Jews. Protestants are starting to get on it too now, with the Quiverful movement. You may have to start your own movement if you don't believe... call it the "r-selection movement" maybe. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-selection for why)

It looks like I'd have to fill that bike about 8 to 10 times per week to feed my family. Each week I have about 4 large carts of food, overfilled top and bottom. Sometimes I hang things off the side. Sometimes I get a second cart.

I don't even bother with beer or bottled water. Each day is about 2 gallons of milk, 2 half-gallons of orange juice, perhaps 8 eggs on average (highly variable, can be about 2 dozen), 10 to 15 bananas, a pair of chickens or a turkey or a goose or similar...

I want the milk that is newest, the meat without marbling, the pear without bruises, and the beets without rotting leaves.

I'm sure it benefits the store to provide me whatever is oldest and/or least desired. If I don't buy more food to compensate, throwing out half of it, there may even be an environmental benefit. (less food waste if people eat the moldy food) No thanks. I want the good stuff.

Well of course. Humane is for humans.

I don't expect a hippo to be nice to me. To a hippo, I'm just a random animal. If I get annoying, the hippo will slaughter me without the slightest bit of compassion.

I'm not doing that job for many reasons, but animal rights is not among them. I'd bite right into the side of a living animal if it were safe to do so. (it isn't: unsanitary, legal trouble, and maybe getting pecked or kicked)

As an end-user, my only complaints about slaughter houses are the bad sanitation and the sleazy attempts to add cheap filler into the meat. As a worker I'd take issue with the pay, the boredom, the legal risk if you fail to follow the crazy laws, the stench, the disease risk, the risk of getting cut or burned or crushed... it's not exactly a cushy office job. I guess it beats being a coal miner or road worker.

If there is a bit of doubt, participation in the test population can be put on hold until that is resolved.

Yes, it is allowed. It is Pope-approved. What is not allowed is sex outside of marriage or the use of birth control to prevent a marriage from producing children. If the man gets butt-raped and thus ends up with HIV, he may certainly use a condom to avoid infecting his wife.

If the law were aligned with the Catholic church, condoms might require a precription. They'd only be available to married couples in which one person has a disease that the other one doesn't. Likewise, birth control pills would be for married women with hormonal problems of the sort that cause severe bleeding during menstration.

Compared to most other church teachings, these positions are actually quite logical. They are the obvious rational conclusion you reach if you start with the belief that sex should be within a marriage and the belief that married people should welcome children into their lives as blessings from God.

Humans make the results more accurate.

Consider the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber, Manson, the guy known as BTK (for "bind, torture, kill"), the Fort Hood shooter, and those guys that raped girls in Connecticut and then burned down the house with them inside. There are enough awful people that we have no shortage of humans for medical experiments.

I would have no qualms about performing the experiments. We can implant wires into their brains, give them harmful drugs, whatever... Except for the Fort Hood shooter, we can use these prisoners to test for methods to treat spinal injury. (we break their neck, wait the average amount of time it takes to reach a hospital, then try the experimental treatment) We can use them to test saving people who fall through ice. (dump them in, wait, attempt treatment) We can use them to test treatments for severe burns. (burn them, wait, attempt treatment)

Want to test something less serious, like household products? Sure, we can do that too. Strap them down, pin back their eyelids, and spray away. Whatever you like: perfume, ant spray, truck bed paint, engine degreaser, dishwasher detergent, laundry detergent, oven cleaner, drain unclogger, etc.

You need a localized description of things. This could be just a book, or it could be something in the editor. It would help to have tooltip-style explanations of keywords and library functions. It would help to have a localized menu showing things that make sense in the current context. Go beyond the supposed English. Explain the operators. For example, the '*' as a pointer reference is surely not English.