When my Waterpik broke after years of use I was happily surprised to learn they still had replacement parts available.

Shout out to KEXP 90.3 FM Seattle / KEXC 92.7 FM Alameda/San Francisco. All real live DJs all the time, picking amazing music across genres.

My sister worked at Abercrombie & Fitch back in their late-90s/early-00s peak. Every month or two, corporate would send a CD to be played in store during open hours. A 60-minute (or less) loop of company-sactioned pop music, all shift, every shift. I wasn’t the one working there and I still felt miserable on her behalf.

as an addition or complement to it.

Our public school district offers a hybrid home school program for this. You can do core subjects at home, and then the kids attend a branch campus for classroom-based electives like music or robotics. It’s really sweet.

Our kids have done a mix of public, private, and home school depending on where we have lived and their individual needs. We are fortunate to have this level of flexibility.

Most challenging: It’s just a ton of work. Doing it well is a full-time job, which is of course why the world has professional teachers.

Most rewarding: Watching the kids really get into certain topics. There is a level of flexibility you can’t get in a large group, and your kid can move at their own speed. So if they decide they’re super into some topic they can quickly finish the other required work for the day and then have time to dive deeper into their topic of interest. I came home yesterday to find that my preteens spent the afternoon composing original music for percussion ensembles, and it’s actually good.

Edit: I know home schooling isn’t popular here on Lemmy. There are definitely people who abuse it to the detriment of their kids. But there are good reasons to do it, too: maybe your kid has special needs that school can’t accommodate, maybe your kid is being harassed, maybe your kid is significantly ahead/behind their grade level and sees school as a pointless waste of time, etc. And you can get plenty of social interaction with sports, clubs, or just playing with other kids in the neighborhood. It does not have to be a solitary activity, and should not be.

First time I read The Catcher in the Rye at 14 or 15: This kid is a whiny bitch. Wtf is his problem?

Second time I read The Catcher in the Rye in my 20’s: Oh, this kid is battling depression and is getting zero support from anyone. I’m in this book and I don’t like it.

Fun fact: The disease is named for Lyme, Connecticut, USA. That’s where it was first identified as a unique condition.

It’s common enough in the northeast and north-central US that my public schools taught everyone basic prevention and symptoms as part of the regular curriculum.

It’s already there, sort of. Zillow’s map shows schools with their greatschools.org ratings. The school rating is a rough proxy for this. Highly-ranked schools tend to be whiter and wealthier.

I always assumed the translators were simply doing a heroic job. Getting puns and wordplay to work across languages is hard. I would not be surprised if some jokes had to be significantly changed for different languages or countries.

Thanks! This has become a January tradition with my kids. We are trying a different winter camp location in 2026, and I really hope there will be enough snow to do this again!

Pile the snow into a big mound, pack it down, then hollow out the middle. Camping overnight is optional.

Maybe related to the Sunshine Act? The intent of the law is to prevent companies from bribing doctors to use their products or drugs. I have seen companies extend it to other employees to be extra cautious.

They are all in medical or medical-adjacent careers: nursing, radiology, pharmaceutical R&D, medical device R&D, etc. These fields seem to attract empathetic people who want to do good.

I have many times, and I agree that travel is a good thing. But don’t be so quick to scoff at Americans who don’t travel overseas. Traveling is expensive. The flight alone from my house to Frankfurt or Tokyo (for example) is at least $1,500 per person, and a day of travel each way. That’s out of reach for a lot of people. Hell, it’s out of reach for me now that I have a family to bring with me. The most basic, banal holiday overseas would easily exceed $10,000. Nevermind the luxury of being able to spend enough time there to understand local takes on geopolitics.

You might get some downvotes for mentioning that book. The author makes a few sloppy assumptions, and the anthropology/sociology/history communities love to hate him for it. His overall thesis is still generally good though, IIRC.

One thing I don’t think is in Diamond’s book: once Europe had realized they could sail far and wide to get things, the Dutch invented the idea of a stock market to fund voyages (the British took this idea and really ran with it). This system made long, risky trips easier to finance. Instead of a single monarch funding a single expedition, many people could pool their money to fund many expeditions.

I agree that none of this means Europeans have some special intelligence or attitude. Any other civilization that developed in similar conditions could have followed the same path.

For boxing specifically, it is absolutely part of the fighters’ marketing strategies.

For sports in general, trash talking during a game is “real.” Extended beefs that get major media coverage might be intentionally played up for publicity.

Depends how high into the triple digits, whether there’s shade and water available, how humid it is, whether air conditioning is an option, etc.

I would probably choose triple digits. I do love cold winters, but a dry 104F with a cool place to swim and big, shady trees is splendid. Beyond about 110F gets miserable, though.

The trend toward subdued color palettes. Every new home is decorated in “millennial gray.” Most cars are black, white, gray, or silver. You have to go out of your way to find bright, colorful clothing or furniture. It’s incredibly boring and I can’t wait for the pendulum to swing back the other way.

Free is good, of course. But I also have some gripes about how Band functions so I’m interested to see what else is out there. Thanks for the Campfire recommendation; I will check it out.

I ate the onion for a second there.

God damn, we are in the worst timeline.