Just ask him what he’s doing when she makes those noises, because you want to try it out on your girlfriend (or have your boyfriend do it to you, either/or, I ain’t gonna judge).

You’re making a ton of straw-man arguments.

1. You don’t have to be the best. You do have to be good enough to get scouted by a professional team if your goal is to play professionally. I never at any point said that it wasn’t worth playing if you couldn’t be the best or do it professionally. I spend a lot of time shooting competitively; it’s likely that I will never make Master or Grandmaster in anything, and as a result I’m never going to be sponsored or be able to earn a living at it. (…Not that the money is very good anyways.) So what? I still have fun.

2. In sports, playing professionally is a meritocracy. Socioeconomic class matters insofar as having more wealth and privilege means that you’ll have access to better training prior to becoming a professional. But the child in question already has access to training, through a parent that plays professionally. But that’s all the farther that socioeconomic class gets you in sports. People from poorer backgrounds often get to go far in sports, if they have the skill.

3. Yes, OP could be wrong. On the other hand, OP is claiming to be a professional in the field, and is therefore more likely to have an informed opinion.

4. Success is a combination of directed effort, an inherent capability; it’s not one or the other. If you lack certain inherent capabilities, then all the directed effort in the world won’t get you where you want to be. You can have all the gifts to achieve greatness in a given field, and yet fail completely if you don’t carefully direct your ability in that area.

5. See above. The kid already has access to top-tier training, and is not making the grade necessary to perform at a professional level. Ergo, the part that is lacking is capability. …Which is why my anecdote is relevant; it’s not my unwillingness to work my ass off that has limited my power lifting aspirations, it’s my physical capabilities. (And yes, I really did work at power lifting. And will again once my shoulder finished healing, even though I’m never going to be competitive at any level.)

6. Of course the kid isn’t going to be at the same level forever. But he’s not on track to be at a level where he’s capable of playing professionally. A 16yo that’s capable of going pro–esp. when they have access to high-level training–would be expected to be performing at a certain level. According to OP, he isn’t. The probability is that, while he will continue to improve (up until age catches up with him), he is not going to be at a professional level in time to make a career of it.

7. You’re drawing a false dichotomy between being honest/realistic with your children, and having a relationship with them. I’m gathering, from what you’re saying, that you don’t believe that the parent should give their child a realistic assessment of their performance, and should simply be encouraging; it that correct? It seem like you believe that putting all of your effort into a goal, and failing to achieve that goal would not cause deep bitterness on its own; am I reading that correctly?

8. “It’s my opinion that it’s better for parents to encourage their children in their dreams […]” I partially disagree. I think that parents need to encourage children to set realistic goals in life, and goals that can be stretch goals. Maybe that looks like going to school to become a biologist, and going on to medical school if biology ends up being fairly easy for them. Maybe that looks like going into a trade if they’re good at working with their hands. Playing professional sports–or being a touring musician that makes enough to live on, etc.–is like winning a jackpot in the lottery. Sure, you gotta play in order to win, but for every person that wins there’s millions of people that don’t. I would hope that you would say that anyone planning for retirement by buying lottery tickets was a fool, even if that person was your child. But even so, you can play sport for fun.

if he’s not great at football even though he’s living with a pro, that shows me how little you value him.

Some people simple don’t have the ability to be good at some things, no matter how hard they work at it, no matter who mentors them. Very, very few people have the ability to be a Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart regardless of what kind of mentorship they have.

Let me give you a concrete example.

I’ve had a major shoulder surgery after tearing the shit out of my supraspinatus and the labrum. The supraspinatus passes through the acromium process on the scapula. The acromium process has roughly three different shapes, which are largely determined by genetics. A type I acromium process is smooth, and allows the spuraspinatus to pass through easily. Type II and type III acromium processes have pronounced ‘hook’ shapes–type III significantly more so–that make injury to the supraspinatus much more probable. I have a type II acromium process. Had Mary Lou Retton been my mother and coach, and I’d tried to be a gymnast, I would have destroyed both of my shoulders long before I was ever going to be going to nation-level events; the limits of the shape of my scapula would have made success impossible, given that a strong and stable shoulder is required in gymnastics, regardless of sex/gender. I would likewise be unable to be a competitive powerlifter, for much the same reason; working up to a nationally competitive snatch would have also destroyed my shoulders. (And, in point of fact, it was working on push-presses that killed it.)

People are not a tabula rasa, only needing the proper encouragement to become paragons in a given field.

Industrial-metal classic.

If I could get a fully remote job and move to the middle of BFE… Well, I’m considering doing that without a remote job, and just accepting that any job I can get will take a longer commute and probably earn pay less. I lived in Chicago for more than a decade, lived in San Diego a few years. Currently I live in a rural part of my state, but the city keeps creeping nearer, and I’m seeing farms in my county get bulldozed to put in yet another housing development “…starting from the low, low $600s!” of identical, oversized, characterless houses with 1/4 acres plots of land and no trees.

I don’t want neighbors. I want trees, deer eating my hostas, raccoons trying to tear open my garbage bins, and bears being oversized raccoons. I want candles and laterns in every room because the power goes out every time there’s a thunderstorm, a woodburning stove that I can feed with trees that get blown down, and enough land that I can raise goats, chickens, and do a little dirt farming, in addition to my job. I want to opt out of this goddamn rat race, and just have a quiet place where I can offer people refuge from the bullshit that’s happening around us.

I think that the YPJ calls themselves something like democratic syndicalists? It’s close enough to anarchism that it’s the easiest way for most people to understand it. The way that they’re organizing their communities is pretty special, and I hope that they’re able to keep their regions autonomous and maintain their ideals.

A lot of the prices have corrected, just not all the way down to pre-pandemic level. I remember that primers were flat-out unavailable for a long time, then they were breaking $.10/ea for really cheap SPPs. 9mm ammo was >50cpr for a while, too. Both are down now, but not down to the $.03 for primers, or 20cpr for 9mm. Some of it is inflation in general. Some of it is that there are more people buying guns and ammo now, and there’s a pretty sharp lag between demand and production, since no one wants to build new factories for temporary demand spikes; increased demand is driving up prices. Also, fun fact, a lot of companies that make AR-15s are getting very close to insolvency right now. Each person only needs so many AR-15 variants, and the market is super-saturated. That’s less of an issue with ammo, since it’s a consumable, but it still worries the companies that would be building new plants.

Yeah, I still wish ammo was a lot cheaper, but it is what it is. Instead of high-volume shooting, it means more time dry-firing.

Liver and onions and corned beef hash are delicious, and I love them. They’re also absolutely awful for you. I have Cream of Wheat in the cupboard, but I prefer grits. Honestly, I mostly make steel-cut oatmeal now.

“I have not seen mincemeat pie in ages, and you could get it à la mode.”

I’ve made real mincemeat pie before, and it’s absolutely nothing like what you can get in cans. For starters, it actually has, yes, real meat in it. The recipe I used was from the late 1800s , and it took most of a day to prepare. And goddamn, it was so delicious, probably something like 2000kcal per slice. You can find the recipe here, on page 393.

Corned beef on rye

That’s mostly a delicatessen thing. If you go to an authentic deli, you should still find it.

If I was going to guess, the actual numbers killed are far, far lower than that. Especially since there are a lot of very large private hunting preserves that intentionally try to keep their feral pig population high so that they can attract paying hunters.

Man, I wish good .308 ammo was only $1/round… Even if I’m loading it myself, good 6.5CM ammo (defined as sub-MOA performance) costs about $1/ea. with Hornady 147gr ELD-M bullets, and that’s only if I ignore how much I’ve sunk into a press and case prep.

The problem is that there are not nearly enough people that hunt to even keep the population stable through hunting. The fact that hog hunting has become a business is the reason that real solutions to wiping out feral populations aren’t making headway.

Have your corpse wrapped in a tarp and weighted down with concrete blocks from a construction site, and have it tossed in an abandoned quarry. That’s probably about the cheapest way; should only cost about $10 for the tarp, and then gas money.

[…]if you’re male and your partner is female then I’m surprised that she has any interest in things like Thundercats or He-Man regardless of her age.

First, I wouldn’t suggest assuming that.

Second, the point isn’t that a partner has to like these things, but they do have to have some kind of awareness of them. You could substitute Smurfs, Family Ties, Michael Jackson’s breakout album Thriller, or watching the Challenger explode on live television because everyone in the school was watching Sally Ride go into space. Or George Bush’s famous “Read my lips: no new taxes” speech. There are a million events that are foundational to who you become. When the person that you’re dating–or in a relationship with–don’t share any of those cultural moments, it’s much more difficult to build a lasting relationship. Not impossible, but harder; that’s true with any cross-cultural relationship as well.

Common interests are nice, yeah, but they aren’t everything. Shared values—and values are very strongly shaped by the things you were exposed to growing up–are probably the single biggest thing; if you don’t share core belief systems (morals, ethics, what is important, meaning, etc.), then it’s unlikely that a relationship can survive.

I’m… Unfortunately older than I wish I was. I am very solidly Gen X. I still find young people physically attractive. But I also find people my own age attractive; I most certainly would not have found people my age attractive when I was in my 20s. Even though I may find younger people attractive, I have zero interest in relationships with them. Not only do I already have a partner, but I simply have nothing in common with most of them. If I make references to Thundercats or He-Man, that shit is going to go entirely over their heads, and I’m likewise not going to understand any of their cultural references.

Fun fact: alprazolam (Xanax) also has a ridiculously high LD50, about 1220mg/kg in female rats. For a human that weighs 57kg, that works out to 69.5 grams, or about 2.5oz of pure alprazolam. The maximum dose for prescription is 4mg, or .004g; you would need to ingest >17,000 4mg bars of Xanax to consume a fatal dose.

Almost all of the time, “fatal overdoses” of Xanax are in combination with other drugs, like alcohol, which can act as a synergist and depress respiration. But most of the time, you’ll just black out for a few days.

(But. We don’t know that actual LD50 in humans, only in rats and mice. It’s possible that the human LD50 is either lower or higher.)

Europe pulled a good one on us […]

No, we did that to ourselves, by always cutting taxes instead of raising them to pay for things that are public goods, like single-payer health care, public transportation, public education, and so on. Our taxes are too low, and as a result we pay far, far more for the same things as private services rather than public. You can complain that the gov’t is inefficient, but there’s no profit; profit takes a far bigger bite than waste, inefficiency, and fraud does.

Start by taxing the shit out of the CEOs and board of directors, with a mechanism built into the taxation so that any increase in their compensation is entirely offset by an increase in taxes. Then offer incentives to on-shore labor again.

The first two links that you posted don’t appear to cover electron microscopy at all. The last appears to show a potential method of attack–which is noted in the link that I posted–but does not seem to show that it’s actually been successfully implemented. (“Using SEM operator-free acquisition and standard image processing technique we demonstrate the possible [emphasis added] automating of such technique over a full memory. […] The technique is a first step [emphasis added] for reverse engineering secure embedded systems.”)

This does not appear to be correct.

A 2 piece puzzle is likely quite solvable even today.

No data has ever been successfully recovered from a broken NAND chip. It’s not expected to be possible in the near future. It’s MUCH more complicated than you thing.