Honestly, my advice, unpopular as it might be, is that unless you plan on riding a motorcycle you should probably get an automatic transmission car instead of learning on a manual transmission. Manual transmissions–in the US, anyways–are largely relegated to performance vehicles where people want them. But the hard truth is that automatic transmissions do a better job at driving efficiently and keeping the engine at a safe and ideal load than any driver with a manual. And it’s a lot less hassle for most of the driving that people tend to actually do. For instance, it’s uncommon to have a cruise control on a manual transmission car, which makes long drives more tiring, and stop-and-go traffic puts less wear on an automatic transmission.

If you plan on riding a motorcycle though, you must learn to use a clutch, because all non-electric motorcycles use a clutch (usually a wet clutch, but Ducati uses a dry clutch); manual transmissions are lighter and more compact, and weight matters a lot on a motorcycle.

I say this as someone that learned to drive on manual transmissions, and exclusively had cars with manual transmissions up through about 2022.

Learn to shift based off the sound of the engine, dont stare at the tachometer.

Do not do this.

Every engine has a different redline. The redline is based mostly on piston mass, which doesn’t necessarily correlate directly to engine displacement, given that it’s common to have 4, 6, or 8 cylinders in a car. If you’re shifting primarily based on engine sound, you can be shifting too low in one car, and then too high in another. The tachometer is a much more reliable way of learning where you should shift in any given vehicle.

Also, constantly running your car in the maximum power band–which tends to be close to the redline–probably isn’t great for it.

I’m guess that you don’t live in the US? Almost all cars in the US–whether training vehicles or not–are gasoline, and it’s mostly larger pickup trucks that are diesel. VW is one of the few companies that sells consumer cars that are diesel, and I’m not sure that they do anymore, not after there was that huge scandal about intentionally cheating EPA emissions standards with their diesel cars a decade back.

Carefully cleaning the udder and teats, and very quickly refrigerating raw milk should significantly reduce the risks of bacterial contamination and growth. This is not done in most cases though, so raw milk usually carries a much higher risk of listeria.

Having had listeria once–contaminated green beans–I very much do not recommend it.

It took a porn star dying after porn makers in the 2000s forced a horse to rape a woman

Uh. You’re going to need to cite a source on that. I’m aware of a man that died after he was mounted by a horse, but AFAIK that was a case where the man was entirely willing because he some really fucked up fetishes.

Thought I could/should work through discomfort and then pain at the gym, supersetting overhead push-presses and triceps dips. LOL, nope, gave myself a labral tear and tore my supraspinatus. My shoulder now has an unpleasant popping feeling + significantly less strength when I’m doing anything like a bench press with my elbows properly tucked; I’ll likely never be able to do narrow grip bench press or triceps dips again.

Why was this dumb? Because I was a personal trainer, and I fucking know better than to try and push through pain. But I was trying to get back into lifting seriously after losing a lot of time to the pandemic.

Well, shit. I hadn’t known about Inquisition. I think the last time I saw them was something like 2016? At least I only have the one t-shirt. :(

I haven’t heard anything about Agalloch; what’s going on there?

Gov’t funded doesn’t drop the cost that much. Countries in the west that are single-payer and/or have national/socialized healthcare systems pay between 1/5 and 2/3 of what we do per capita, on average. It might be better in countries where the entire supply chain is subject to price controls (e…g., China), but I don’t know. But, regardless, if our system cost 20% of what it does now, or $900B, $3B would still be only .3% of the entire expenditure. Part of the problem is that, as far as western countries go, the US is just big. The population of Israel is estimated to be about 9.5M, compared to 340M or so for the US.

Again, to be clear: I’m not suggesting that we should be giving–or selling–Israel anything at this point.

Jesus fuck. You argue that the tyranny of the majority doesn’t exist, and when I prove that it does, with examples, you block. You can’t even cite anything to justify your position.

What the shit, my dude.

Yes, $24B, sorry.

If they spent $24.00 on their own defense, and the US gave them $3B, then, uh, they’d be 100% dependent on the US.

You think you’re doing that. But are you? Or are things happening below the threshold of your consciousness, and your conscious brain thinks that it’s the one running the show? Consciousness would be like the toddler with the toy steering wheel that thinks it’s driving the car.

It’s so wild that girls would be hot for someone from Slipknot, but did Beefcake the Mighty or Jizzmak the Gusher ever get any fangirls? No. (Oderus, on the other hand… I guess the Cuttlefish of Cthulhu was what all the girls really wanted.)

Well, Armin Meiwes went to prison for that, so…

I wouldn’t say justified, buuuuuuuuuut where else could he have gone? China is about the only other possibility.

To be clear, I think he should be pardoned, and thing USA-Patriot act should be overturned.

It wouldn’t even be noticeable. We spend a total of about $4.5 trillion [EDIT: on healthcare]; $3B is 0.07% of that total.

And, BTW, we have terrible outcomes for how much we spend.

They won’t; sponsored by the big capital

Yes, but that doesn’t mean they can’t get away from it. Sanders managed to run very strong presidential primary campaigns, twice, and almost all of his funding was from individual donors giving his campaign under $100 each.

Dems could do this, if leadership had the will.

3rd parties can’t, or they can’t yet, because none of them have put in sufficient work at a grassroots level yet to consistently win places on state legislatures, much less federally.

You are arguing in favor of being a slave with no rights because JKR paid to have a law passed.

No, what I specifically said was that we shouldn’t follow the will of the majority in all things, because the majority can and does act in tyrannical ways. Meanwhile, you’re insisting that letting everyone always vote on every single thing would somehow result in a utopia.

Here’s the thing: I live in the rural south. Our local high school has one transgender student. The superintendent consulted with an attorney, and then let the student us the bathroom of the gender that they identify with. The community as a whole fucking lost their minds. The school board held a public meeting about it where they explained why they took the steps they did, and then they let community members speak. In a town of 5k people, there were over 500 people attending. They cut off comments after three hours. It was roughly 10:1 against treating this poor girl like a girl.

If they’d taken a vote that very day, she would have been run out of town on a rail covered in tar and feathers, because the town is full of bigoted evangelical christians. But you think that people should always get to vote on everything, even when they have zero real knowledge about the subject? That’s absolute nonsense.

The places in then world where people vote on policy are the objectively safest for trans people.

Okay, and right fucking now those countries are voting for people that have explicitly told them that they’re going to clamp down on trans rights, and then those people are doing it. So the countries where people vote are becoming less safe for trans people, even if it’s still safer than being transgender in, say, Iran.

If the unconscious mind is making the decisions prior to cognition about the thing, how could our will alone affect it? It seems more likely that things outside of our direct control are changing how we are acting, and then the conscious part of ourselves creates the reason that we acted in a specific way.

This is both true, and not entirely accurate.

Israel spends something like $24 on their defense. The $3B that the the US gives them (and it’s $3B, not $4B, based on what I can find) is largely in the form of military materials: ammunition, bombs, air defense systems, etc. So what we give them is about 20% of their total defense spend, and yeah, that’s a lot.

But the flip side of that is that American workers in American factories are the ones building the bombs, missiles defense systems, making the bullets, etc.; the money that the gov’t gives Israel ends up creating a benefit for workers in the form of work that wouldn’t otherwise exist. I’d have to see a real economic analysis, but this might be a case of each dollar that the gov’t spends creating more than a dollar of effect. (And yeah, I know that a lot of that effect is going to e.g. Raytheon shareholders rather than line workers. But still.)

BUT

The fact that we see an economic benefit in terms of jobs and growth by giving Israel aid doesn’t mean we should. Because we’re directly funding the genocide of the Palestinians.

No. Last I knew, PET (?) scans appear to indicate that decisions are reached by your unconscious mind before they’re made by your conscious mind; the implication is that what you believe is you making a choice is actually you rationalizing a choice that’s been made through processes that you can’t directly see or affect. IF that’s correct, then people are quite deterministic, as long as you know all of the inputs.

But on a practical, day-to-day basis, calling it ‘free will’ is a convenient fiction or shorthand. While free will may not exist, we largely believe that it does, and our perception of that in turn shapes our perception of reality. So it ends up not really mattering, strictly speaking.