I overall agree that for some things it can make sense to have separate gendered spaces, shelters make sense, I can see gyms, etc. places where people are feeling particularly vulnerable, self conscious, dealing with trauma, etc. and being around the opposite gender could be a part of that.

But in other cases, I think the right move is to get over ourselves and be rid of pointless gendering in some activities.

A lot of my friends and myself are traditionally “manly” in a lot of ways, outdoorsy, cigar smokers, whiskey drinkers, a lot of us work with our hands, like guns, etc. That said, we’re a pretty enlightened group, we’re not out shit-talking our wives and engaging in demeaning “locker room” talk and such when we get together to have what could be loosely called our “boys nights out.” It’s happened from time to time that a female friend ends up tagging along and absolutely nothing changes about our behavior, the fact that there is a woman in the room in no way takes away from the experience, and if anything adds to it in a “the more the merrier” sort of way. Any woman who is willing to put up with the cigar smoke, fart jokes, peeing on trees in the woods, etc. is more than welcome to come along, it just happens that most don’t enjoy that.

Now of course you also run into a whole lot of complicated situations, the way men tend to interact with other men, and the way women interact with other women are different. I’m not going to go into all of the nature vs nurture, societal expectations, toxic masculinity, etc. involved but all of that certainly plays a big part. I’m no sociologist, but my overall impression (and I may be wrong)is that women can kind of mesh into the male social structure without making too many waves provided that the men aren’t assholes (which is far from guaranteed,) but it’s very hard for a lot of men to get themselves into the right kind of headspace to participate in the sort of socializing women want and need from their social groups without disrupting things to the point that the women aren’t able to get what they need out of it.

And circling around to shelters, men may need more shelters by sheer numbers, but on average each individual homeless woman is probably in a more vulnerable position than the average homeless man. Really more shelter space is needed across the board.

And the horse people will try to retort that dog poop takes longer to break down, smells worse, and is more likely to spread disease

Which is true, still doesn’t justify not cleaning up after your horse. Just because the horse manure is “less bad” doesn’t make it ok.

Another thought that crossed my mind, since most of these people don’t live with their horses within horseback -riding distance of most of these trails, so these people usually have to go hitch up a horse trailer to a gas guzzler of a pickup truck and drive sometimes a pretty considerable distance to take their horses out. Often the parking areas at the trail heads aren’t particularly well suited to accommodating a truck and horse trailer, and they end up being kind of a parking nuisance on top of that.

If they do where you live, I’m happy for you, but I’ve spent a lot of time hiking in my area hiking on shared use trails and have never seen any rider clean up after their horses or who even looked like they were prepared to, and there is always horse manure along the trails.

Cops should too, I make no exception for them.

They absolutely are, and if there were any ATV trails in my area I’d feel just ash strongly about that. As it is though, a lot of these trails aren’t even open to pedaled mountain bikes (partially because they spook some of the horses) and with the ones that are, there’s some significant debate on whether e bikes should be allowed.

Horse riders should have to clean up after their horses on trails.

I’m a big believer in leave no trace in the outdoors. To the best of your ability, everything should be as you found it when you leave the woods.

Wild horses have been extinct in north America for many thousands of years, in my local area as far as fossil and archeological records can show any native horses that might have existed here were long gone before the first native Americans set foot here. They are not a part of the ecosystem.

I don’t care if it’s biodegradable, I wouldn’t leave apple cores and banana peels behind either.

The environment in my local parks isn’t so delicate that a few entitled rich assholes leaving behind horse shit probably isn’t going to make a significant impact, but there are other places where it absolutely could, throwing off the chemical composition of the soil, contaminating ground water, causing algal blooms, introducing non-native parasites, bacteria, and pathogens, etc. and you should be following best practices across the board. Treat every inch of the outdoors as if it were potentially vulnerable and don’t try to bend the rules just because you think you can get away with it.

And it’s just an eyesore and detracts from the natural beauty.

The horse people fire back about how they can’t carry a shovel with them, or how they may not be able to safely get on or off the horse. This is the shit horses were bred for- to carry people and stuff, I can find you an avalanche shovel and a small folding step stools that will break down plenty small and light enough to fit in a backpack or lash to the saddle with some rope to pull the stool up after you get on, and it’s all gonna weigh a lot less than the armor, and rifles, bedrooms, etc. that people used to ride horses with for a lot longer and harder than the couple house you’re spending plodding along the trail. If you can afford to go horseback riding you can afford the hundred bucks or so for a shovel and a step stool. If that’s not enough for you to get on and off your horse safely on the trail, maybe you should take that as a sign that you shouldn’t be riding a horse there, stick to a dude ranch where some big strong cowboy will help you get on and off of the horsey.

It seems like OP is probably pushing a bit of an agenda here (maybe a good one, maybe a bad one depending on where you land on the whole Israel situation, I’m not gonna go into that right now) but in case you’re just out of the loop

There’s recently been some incidents in Lebanon where pagers and radios have been exploding. Not just defective Samsung Note battery bursting-into-flames exploding, but packed full of actual explosives, detonating, and killing people exploding

Long story short, Israel intercepted a shipment of these devices going to Hezbollah, and planted remote triggered bombs in them.

And some people are concerned about this, and probably rightly so, first of all these pagers have caused some collateral damages, killing and hurting bystanders. Secondly, we don’t exactly know how widespread this has been- are there other people out in Lebanon or other parts of the world walking around with literal bombs in their pocket? What if those devices get lost, stolen, sold/traded in? What if the target had been onboard a plane or something when the pager detonated? What if the bomb doesn’t go off as intended- is it gonna go off in a trash truck, recycling facility, or incinerator when they decide to get rid of it?

I consider myself to be a fairly tech literate person. Not a professional, but better than average. The guy my family comes to to troubleshoot computer problems, basic working understanding of programming and networking but not nearly enough to do it professionally.

I think you’re shooting too high on some of these.

Basic hardware is good, but don’t spend too much time on it or go into too much detail, just kind of basic overviews. Boot chain is probably pushing it, but basic overview of operating systems is good.

I probably wouldn’t go so far as having them install their own Linux distro, that feels like you want to take a week of your class time to troubleshoot all the potential issues that come up, if you do it on school computers you’re probably looking at a nightmare getting that cleared by your IT department, and if it’s their personal devices you’re probably going to catch an earful from some parents for messing up their/their kids computer.

I do think it’s a good idea to have some computers running Linux for them to use so they can see what it’s like, and probably some macs too, I’m not an apple guy but there’s a lot of them out there and people should be at least a little familiar with both.

I don’t know what the current state of things in schools is, but you can certainly hand out some flash drives, but there’s a decent chance they already have some. I know over a decade ago when I was in high school pretty much all of us were already carrying around flash drives.

Programming is good to introduce them to, python is a solid choice, but unless these are kids who are pretty sure they want to go into computer science I wouldn’t go too deep. It’s not a particularly useful language for actual usage but I think that BASIC still has a useful role as a way to teach the fundamentals of programming to people in an accessible way to see if they may want to pursue it further. I know programmers hate it, but visual basic is also kind of satisfying because it makes it pretty easy to crank out something that looks like an actual finished product.

I’d keep networking pretty straightforward. Network stack and OSI are probably a little too high level to go into, but basics about WiFi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, routers, switches, firewalls, etc. are good to know.

Basic typing and general computer use are probably something a lot of kids could use some work on. A lot of kids these days have a lot less experience with keyboard and mouse computer use thanks to smartphones and tablets. Don’t shun the touchscreen devices though, they’re more powerful than a lot of people give them credit for, and since that’s the way technology is trending figure out how to push the borders on what you can do with them.

I’m also bald, but even before I started shaving my head and had long hair I wore a lot of hats. Still helped keep the sun off me and I tend to run kind of hot so it helped keep sweaty hair out of my face.

I have a couple hats similar to those kicking around, they mostly get used when I’m camping, hiking, etc.

My main every day summer hats are a panama straw fedora, a linen flat cap, and very occasionally a trucker cap that I mostly use as my fishing hat.

I also have a straw cowboy hat that I only bust out occasionally, when I’m both feeling a little silly and I’m gonna be out in direct sun for a long time, like out in the middle of my lake on my kayak. It looks a little goofy, I’m certainly no cowboy, but it’s practically like walking around with a shade umbrella on my head.

I tend to run pretty hot and sweaty, so when the sun isn’t a concern, I often wear a bandana to keep sweat out of my face.

My wife has a very big, floppy hat she wears at the beach sometimes, looks like straw but is actually some sort of recycled plastic.

My mom would not be able to wear a hat during the summer obviously heat would stay in and she would get too hot.

I think you’re starting from a faulty assumption here.

In general, it’s often wise to wear a hat in the summer and can help you feel cooler providing a little bit of portable shade, and helps keep the sun out of your eyes and off your face/neck/ears/shoulders.

It’s just about finding the right hat, something lightweight, breathable, and preferably lighter in color (to reflect the sun’s rays instead of absorbing them) and maybe with a wider brim.

Straw hats are a fairly traditional option, something like a panama hat (actually made from palms, also made in Ecuador and not panama BTW) is a classic option, but this is 2024 so there’s lots of moisture wicking synthetic material options out there as well. For other natural materials, linen is also a good choice, certain types and weaves of cotton can be pretty light and breathable, and honestly even some lighter weight wool hats aren’t too bad.

Take a look at people who work or spend a lot of time outdoors in warmer climates, you’ll see a lot of people wearing hats or cultures where people traditionally wore a lot of hats even if they’ve fallen out of style. Baseball caps, visors, cowboy hats, fedoras, pith helmets, beater hats, various types of headscarves, big floppy sun hats, bucket hats, asian conical hats, sombreros, etc.

I wear hats pretty much year-round. The hats I like in the summer are different from my winter hats, but it’s pretty rare that I go out without some kind of hat, and when I forget to grab one on my way out the door, I feel less comfortable for it.

I haven’t, but I live in PA, so we have scrapple which sounds pretty similar.

I’m just curious what your interpretation of yellow laces is. I’m not a punk but am vaguely aware of lace codes, and every list I see online has yellow as anti-racist, but I know it varied a bit from place to place.

I once drove through Ohio, don’t remember my exact route, but came up north from Kentucky to Cincinnati, then east into Pennsylvania

There may be more boring drives out there, but I haven’t made them.

Cincinnati seemed like a nice enough city though. Can’t think of any particular reason I’d ever want to go back, but I didn’t hate it, so that was pretty much the high point of my time in Ohio

Houses also have thermostats

Also, on Earth we already have situations near the equator where there’s not really a significant change in the weather from one season to the next, or near the poles where for parts of the year days are considerably longer/shorter than elsewhere on the planet, we also have people living in scorching deserts and frozen tundras, at high altitudes with thinner atmosphere, etc. and despite all that variation we don’t really see major differences in how quickly children mature.

The differences could be even more profound on other planets of course.

There have also been studies where people have lived in caves or bunkers without natural light, clocks, or other cues about the time or day/night cycle, and it’s been found that we stay pretty close to a 24 hour circadian rhythm (usually slightly longer actually, but within a few hours of that target,) so it seems like that’s something that might be hard-coded into us. Of course those studies have been done on adults who have had decades to acclimate to a 24 hour cycle, so it’s plausible that kids raised in a different environment would naturally adapt to a different cycle, but since we’re probably not going to be sending unaccompanied minors to the stars, those same kids would probably be raised by adults who are used to a 24 hour schedule and would raise those children in the same schedule.

You might see some divergence from that over the years and multiple generations, but if there’s a 24 hour clock present, and people decide to stick to that, I suspect that would work just fine. It would probably come down to whether it’s more beneficial for people to be in sync with the rest of humanity, or to be on the local cycle. My money’s on the former, since we probably aren’t going to need to worry about hunting for sustenance or avoiding predators, or other such things that our circadian rhythms evolved for.

Something we can’t really account for though is if different gravity would affect how quickly children mature. It will almost certainly have an effect on how they mature with differences in height and muscle/bone density, but I don’t think we can really say if it will change how quickly their brains develop, when they begin puberty, etc.

There’s other factors that could play a part as well of course, the composition of the atmosphere, the intensity of radiation from the star you’re orbiting, diet, exercise, different mutations that could arise over the generations.

The house behind my parents has had a string of terrible tenants. Loud assholes, people who let their dogs run loose, people with unruly kids, etc.

Otherwise a pretty decent neighborhood.

There was a younger dude living there for a while, kept kind of weird hours, but my parents never thought much of that, figured he was going to school, working night shift somewhere, etc. Mostly kept to himself, never bothered my parents in any way, always dressed professionally, etc.

He was probably the best neighbor my parents ever had in that house.

Then one day cops raided the place, turns out he’d been dealing a lot of drugs out of there and had a punch bowl full of cocaine sitting out on the kitchen counter.

Some of the other neighbors apparently had noticed some pretty sketchy characters coming and going from the house, they must have entered from the front door though, because my parents never really noticed anyone.

My parents would still take the drug dealer over pretty much anyone else that’s lived there.

Couldn’t tell you how many I had as a little kid, but I’ve probably gone through about 2-3 a year since I was about 16

One time I treated myself to a pair of Oakley’s i found an an REI garage sale, thinking maybe more expensive sunglasses would hold up better or I’d keep better track of them.

They got dropped and stepped on within about a week

We also don’t have any particular reason to think that it will

Other planets are going to likely need 2 calendars.

They’re of course going to need to keep track of the local day/night cycle, seasons, etc.

But we’re also going to need a universal calendar to keep things in sync between different planets, and that’s probably going to be the Gregorian calendar or whatever earth is currently using.

If you’re born on another planet, and that planet goes around its star 18 times, or spins on its axis 6000-some times, that doesn’t mean you’re biologically an 18 year old adult, that planet’s year and days could be significantly longer or shorter. So things like people’s ages are going to have to be figured in equivalence to earth years.

We’ll also need a coordinated time/calendar for interplanetary travel/commerce/communication. If Mars needs something delivered from the Europa colony by X time/date, and to deliver on that Europa needs materials from some remote asteroid mining outpost by Y time/date, they need to be in agreement on what that all means. Mucking around with mars years and days vs jovian years and Europan days, and whatever passes for days and years for an asteroid tumbling around in the belt is sure to lead to headaches. Better to have that all working on one system, and since humans across the federation/empire/whatever are already keeping track of earth years we might as well just use that instead of coming up with a third system for everyone to keep track of.

I think what qualifies as “large” really depends on the space you’re putting it in, what you’re used to, and how old you are.

When I was a kid, unless you were rich, there’s a good chance the TV in your living room was a CRT in the 30-40-ish inch range. I bought myself a 50" TV for my room when I was 18 with money I saved from my first job as one of my first big purchases for myself,and with the bezels at the time it was probably closer to a modern 55 or 60 inch tv in overall size. That thing seemed huge to me, especially given how small my bedroom was, even though it’s probably pretty standard these days.

So to me, 50" is kind of the benchmark for where I start calling a TV “big” even though I have a 70inch in my home now, and if I were filthy rich I could have one that’s over 100" now.