Yup some Daoist secs historically believed semen contains life force. Via “retention of the semen”, a man could maintain his vital life force and slow aging. However, having sex would generate life force. So you could extend your life by having sex as much as possible while controlling how often you ejaculate.

That’s absolutely false. I have personally tested a range of different steep times and the difference in taste is obvious. If you can’t taste the difference your taste buds must be fried or something.

Pressing down on the piston does not provide a meaningful amount of pressure; this has been proven by people instrumenting aeropresses which provide more back pressure than an espresso. Extraction is objectively time dependent, it has been extensively discussed and really isn’t up for debate at all.

You are supposed to wait a few minutes before plunging and decanting French press though. If you are just pressing it and serving your French press coffee must be absolutely terrible.

A decent drip maker with a timer will make better coffee than you are making and also be less work on top of it. Wake up to fresh hot coffee, done

Okay? How is that relevant?

Basically nobody in the current era is suggesting ethanol as an alternative to any of the things you are mentioning, and realistically ethanol is not being used as a primary fuel source. Most cars can’t even take E85 without modifications. It’s used as a fuel additive, for which is has significant public health benefits, and for industrial uses like a perfumery ingredient or a solvent

It’s valuable for reducing smog and makes great fuel for performance cars

He certainly has tenure:

Lamborghini Miura and Mercedes 300SL Gullwing both have it beat IMO

Also, it’s engineers who land robots on other planets, not scientists

Yup. I regularly have to travel flagstaff to Denver, and it would take me over two days to make the trip.

I have another thread in here talking about cost, but just the mileage fees for a trip on a car you own can be a significant percentage of the cost of chartering a plane. If you rent the car it can cost significantly more.

Owning a private rail car is a bit like owning a superyacht; it’s not a particularly fast or practical form of travel but it can be luxurious and fun so people with money do it anyways.

It’s FAR more expensive than vans. For comparison, a fully renovated carriage could cost in the neighborhood of $1M, and Amtrak mileage fees are in the neighborhood of $5/mil. Renting a private car is around $15k per day per car, including mileage fees.

For comparison San Diego to San Francisco is a one day trip by train and about 600 miles. So, you’d be paying in the neighborhood of $2500 for those miles if you own the car, and $15k for charter. You could charter a private turboprop airplane to go that same distance for around $7000. Add in that some private car owners will string multiple cars together, and it can easily exceed the cost of just going by private plane even if you own the cars and charter the plane.

At the end of the day, it’s like having a superyacht—it’s rarely the most affordable or practical route but it is fun and luxurious so rich people do it anyway.

Man you seem to be very negative about this.

I guarantee you that most tourists don’t even leave the rim of the grand canyon at all. They walk around the visitors center for an hour and go home. Go more than 1000’ down from the rim and it’s not particularly crowded at all.

I can’t comment on Europe, like the previous poster—America has far more wide open wilderness than Europe does in general—but if in the USA there are still countless places where you can backpack for days without seeing a single person. There are also plenty of easier hikes with beautiful views that only see a few visitors a day. Just need to put in the footwork to find them. You won’t find them by staying at home and complaining about other hikers.

Well, they are half human so their human half’s genetic memory drives them to swing their arms unnecessarily

And wouldn’t you say the opposite of bearlandia is not-bear-landia?

Male birth control has to be safer and have fewer side effects than letting women carry the burden of birth control.

I mean, I don’t think this is such a high bar to pass.

Pregnancy is bad but I’d argue the consequences of 18 years of unwilling parenthood far outstrips the consequences of 9 months of pregnancy. The consequences for those 18 years impact both parties.

Furthermore, men have almost zero agency of what happens in the case of an unintended pregnancy. A man can’t say, “this would ruin my life, I am going to choose not to have the baby.”

That makes the risk quite high for a man, IMO, and the only way to take agency over that risk is male birth control.

To be fair, right around 50% of us are vehemently opposed to this sort of thing. Far from all America

Since when could you hold a musket on your belt?

They typically had barrels over three feet long, with a total weapon length over four feet.

Guns also are not manufactured clandestinely en masse, anywhere, because it takes a lot of precise industrial machining to do at scale. They are not like sex or weed that are impossible to ban, when you stop manufacturing them for nonsense reasons, they stop circulating and criminals stop being able to get their hands on them.

This is false. There are multiple Latin American countries where street gangs have been manufacturing reasonably sophisticated all-metal submachine guns at scale in clandestine factories for over a decade. Even prior to the 3d printing boom, open bolt submachine gun were fairly simple for an individual to manufacture with common hand tools, and quantities scale rapidly with improvised tooling and readily available machines like benchtop lathes.

With 3d printing, it has become even more accessible. Printers can be used to manufacture tooling in addition to parts, and the DEFcad community has been remarkably resourceful in developing new methods utilizing 3d printers. Everything from electrochemically etched, rifled, barrels to recoilless rifles with shaped charge warheads can be made at home if a person has no compunctions about breaking the law.

You can see the impact of 3d printing overseas, where there are a number of rebel groups using 3d printed firearms as their primary armament. Banning guns might reduce the quality of what is available, but it definitely won’t end production in a country full of gun enthusiasts with the interest and skills to make firearms.

I do not understand why Americans think they are such unfathomably unique snowflakes that none of the evidence or lessons learned from every other developed country could apply to them.

As I said, our gun culture ensures people continue to make firearms regardless of what the law says. We have countless machinists, gunsmiths, and hobbyists that would manufacture guns as a form of protest if they were banned. Furthermore, we already have more guns than people and the vast majority of them would remain in civilian hands if the government tried to seize them.

But most importantly, many Americans believe that the equalizing force of firearms—something that allows the citizenry to defend themselves against tyranny and for the weak/frail to defend themselves against the physically strong— is philosophically worth a small reduction in public safety.

Never suggested they didn’t. I’m suggesting that the country would have been better off if they both had weapons and chose to resist.

We aren’t Germany. The founding fathers made sure we could arm ourselves. The choices we make are our own.

This is honestly, the dumbest, most American take in the world.

Hell yeah brother 🦅🦅🦅

It literally ignores the plainly obvious fact that not a single other developed country allows gun ownership, and yet, still have rights and democracy and freedom.

Many other developed countries allow gun ownership. Educate yourself, my man.

But more importantly, I literally do not care if they do or not. The point was never that democracy cannot exist without firearms, but rather that in the worst case scenario an armed citizenry can act as a force against tyranny. It’s a rare thing that it might be needed, and a last resort. No sane person wants a civil war

Guns did not get your rights

Except they literally did. How do you think the revolutionary war was won, softly spoken words?

they do not protect you from a government that has AI powered drones with anti tank mines on them. Hell a fucking APC with a sound cannon will make your AR look like a child’s toy.

Guerrillas with small arms in developing countries have repelled the US military repeatedly over the past half century. More importantly, if you don’t think a combination of small arms and low cost homemade munitions are effective against a modern military you haven’t been paying attention to the war in Ukraine at all.