Americans are renounced for not knowing their geography, but thinking that Indonesia is within US borders is still astonishing.

You understand how Customs works, right? By the time they allow you on "US soil", you've already spent ten hours with 100+ people packed into a flying sardine, landed somewhere inside the US, made your way from Terminal F to terminal D, spent 15 minutes mixing with a different group of 50 people on a rolling sardine can, spend another half hour packed in line with hundreds of people so some minor official can wave a blacklight over your passport with no clue why... And only then do they allow you to mingle with the far less densely-packed US public.

Somehow, I question the efficacy of bothering to send the one symptomatic visitor back, at that last point in a whole chain of weakest links.

Normally, these children are protected by herd immunity [wikipedia.org], but when enough people begin to refuse vaccinations based on stupid, insane, and utterly discredited theories

Or, to put it another way - The lord is my shepherd, but I ain't a sheep!

Herd immunity doesn't work if a bunch of idiots decides that vaccines are evil/dangerous/demonstrative of a lack of faith/useless/*insert absurd argument here*.

Most importantly, herd immunity doesn't work if you socialize almost exclusively with a herd lacking that particular immunity.

Which, incidentally, makes this just the most sublimely satisfying bit of news I've heard all week - Idiots reject vaccination on assorted bogus grounds, trusting that their baby won't die of some horrible disease because our society has largely eradicated it (through vaccination, no less). Idiots then hang out with other idiots following the same flawed logic. Idiots thereby have their gene-pool chlorinated.

Sadly, not fast enough, and really, quite a pity that these things mostly affect the young, not-yet-brainwashed members of their community. But - if you'll pardon the pun - baby-steps in the right direction.


/ Now if we could just find a disease that prefers people who drive too slow in the left lane...

Ike was just doing a 'grim and gritty' reboot of Smedley Butler.

I've spent more and time on board games this year than video games.

Don't worry, I'm sure Trump has been called much worse.

I'm 31 with zero credit and zero debt

Those don't equal zero credit history.

You've never bought a car? Had a student loan? Rented an apartment? Had a credit card? Had a utility bill, cable/satellite, or cell-phone service in your own name? Had a regular above-the-table job?


fuck you

Sorry if I hit a little close to (your mom's) home dude, but if you can honestly answer "no" to all of the above - If not Amish, you pretty much prove my point. I hear this season's OG Kush has a heck of a kick!

If I friend a guy I knew 20 years ago in high school who didn't pay off a loan, what does that have to do with my ability to pay off a loan? Not a damn thing.

If you still have no credit history at 38, then you almost certainly still smoke weed with that high school friend in his mom's basement. This has nothing to do with your "real" FICO score, think of it more like the "payday loans" version of a credit rating. Nothing to see here, move along.

As an aside, though - Why would you "friend" a deadbeat you haven't even bothered to talk to in 20 years? Anyone I would want to have stayed in contact with - I did.

Speak for yourself -- I've done so many pushups I'm technically a perky "B" cup.

I volunteer with my local engineering association, and gender diversity is something we've been working towards. It's a tough slog, and there's a laundry list of items as long as your arm as to why there aren't more women in engineering. There's no easy answer.

Do you know what the most equal of the engineering disciplines is?

It's Civil, where women make up a lofty 17% (seventeen percent).

Good thoughts. Words of wisdom.

Now that I've retired, I'm trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.

I have some artistic and musical talent but both would need a lot of training.

The testosterone effect is pronounced for about 25% of men. They really need to go on HRT. For me, it rolled back the clock from 45 to 30 (both physically/muscles, reaction time, background pain level, healing rate, reaction to working out, desire for sex, performance during sex, ability to sleep, clarity of thought, and mood). So I recommend every male go and get tested. If you are below 300 and feel different, you need supplementation. You can only stay on it until you get prostate cancer and then you are done because HRT is like gasoline to prostate cancer. Tho really it's due to the testosterone aromatizing into estrogen and not to the testosterone directly.

The 90 year old man is atypical (but you know that given your inclusion of genetics). For one thing, 98.2% of people are dead by age 90-- men die at a higher rate so right from the start he's in the 1% that was still alive. Some people are active after 100. But you don't have nearly as much "extra" to recover from setbacks.

This weekend, I attended the funeral of a a healthy active, fit 77 year old who got up from a couch, passed out and fell down all of 6' to the floor and got a concussion and died within 45 days.

Probably the alcohol!

I had never heard of this feature and tested it and it's going to be useful.

I dislike the way smart phones and browsers are no longer documented and are just expected to be "intuitive". It was over a year before I pressed and held the icon on my phone that brought up a app history list of what I'd run since last boot. The icon did something else basic when hit for shorter periods of time.

I guess I just have ot hit every possible key combination after every patch to figure out what has changed.

The summary says, "if you close a tab by accident, you can reopen the tab with the content it was displaying by pressing "Ctrl Key + Shift Key + 't'" key. And gives an alternate key combination for the Mac.

Phone sex?

This isn't 1876, Alexander. We have webcams for this shit now.

One more thing- most families in the U.S. require two incomes to get by because the cost of living is so high.

So it's not unreasonable to expect that a family in chile would require two incomes to live as comparatively well as a U.S. family.

And a family bringing in $48,000 U.S. would be making a ton of money in chile- probably top 10% income in the country.

All I'm saying is that these workers raises won't be in a vacuum. At some point, everyone else in society gets a raise too and then they do need to make $60k or even $80k each to live as well as they do.

I did some research on chilean real estate and good houses built to U.S. standards on good property sell for as much or more than in the U.S.