In your first examples, you are using female as an adjective. A female troop, a female Sargent, a male soldier. That’s usually fine. Even “that female cashier over there” is probably fine. However if you say “that female over there” or like you pointed out, “get over here right now, female” or really any other instance where female is used as a noun instead of an adjective, that’s where it becomes gross. It’s all about adjective vs noun. Adjective: usually fine. Noun: usually not.

I want to start by saying this is an attempt at an explanation not just for you, but anyone who stumbles upon this thread, and is not making any assumptions of anyone’s character.

The answer to why it’s offensive or gross is twofold.

First is that using it as a noun like saying “I went on a date with a female” sounds clinical or sterile. Female as a noun is mostly used in science and medicine, and women don’t want to feel like test subjects. They get objectified enough as it is. Is it technically incorrect? No. But it feels that way to the person being called it.

Which leads to the second, more important reason. They’ve asked. Again, to emphasize the importance: They’ve asked. In general (yes there are exceptions), women have asked people to stop referring to them as females (the noun), and if you respect people, then you call them what they ask. You hopefully don’t call Asians Orientals anymore. And when your friend Stephen says he goes by Steve, hopefully you say Steve the majority of the time. Or if Richard really hates being called Dick, then hopefully you don’t call him Dick. Language is fluid and cultural, and if you want to get along with people (Asians, Steve, Richard, women) then you should learn to use language their way.

I think that is really the more important reason, because it’s totally fair if you don’t understand why someone else finds something offensive. Everyone has had different life experiences and not everything offends everyone. But when a large swath of society says they find it offensive and you continue to do so, then you are being offensive regardless of whether or not you understand why. And in the end, if you choose to continue to be offensive just because you don’t buy the reasoning, then you shouldn’t be surprised when you get bad reactions and find it hard to bond.

Tips for a better life: Call people what they want to be called. Be nice for no reason. If in doubt, ask for advice from someone who doesn’t look like you.

Hope this makes at least some sense.

In general, female is an adjective. It can be used as a noun, but generally shouldn’t be, at least when talking about humans. So you can say “my female colleague” or “a woman I work with”. You can say “the female mind” or “a woman’s brain.” You can say “a panel of female postal workers” or “a panel of women who work for the post office.” If you stick to the adjective/noun rule, you’ll come off far less offensive/gross sounding. Hope this helps.

Yeah, I’d say it’s 50/50 on whether a pretzel gets served with mustard or cheese in my experience, and I almost always try the pretzel when it’s on the menu. Sometimes you get both. Assuming we’re talking soft pretzels. Hard pretzels, idk.

If somebody is thanking you, you likely exerted effort on their behalf. So they say “thank you” for exerting effort, and then you respond with exerting effort was “no problem” you don’t need to thank me. You’re welcome would be a response more along the lines of “you are welcome” to make me exert effort.

They’re both fine, and it’s both a generational and locational thing. I personally prefer “no problem” because honestly I don’t mind helping, but I’m also not giving you permission to use my effort at any time. You can have my efforts when it doesn’t cause a problem.

960mbps up/down for $75usd/m

SMS doesn’t handle pictures, videos, gifs, reactions, or group conversations. Things I use all the time. MMS handles some of that, but implementation varies greatly by carrier and device. If you want consistency of that functionality, you have to go with an app. Apple and Google have created replacements for SMS and MMS that could be the next version of “texting” but Apple refuses to let anyone else use theirs (iMessage) and Google has only half opened up theirs (RCS), so those don’t really fix much.

When Meta bought Oculus, I boxed up my OG Quest and threw it in the basement,

Meta (at the time it was still just named Facebook) bought Oculus before they ever released a retail product. Facebook bought them between the release of the original dev kit on Kickstarter and the dk2 in 2014. They had already been owned by Facebook for 2 years when the first Retail Rift came out in 2016. The first Quest didn’t come out until 2019, 5 years after Facebook/Meta bought Oculus.

When I worked at Toys R Us, we had a kids clothes section and it was basically on a 3 week rotation. One week, brands 1 and 2 were on sale, next week brands 3 and 4, then finally brands 5 and 6 before starting over the next week. It wasn’t 100% predictable, but generally everything would go on sale at least once a month. Sales on toys were less predictable just because there’s so many more of them to cycle through.

John Oliver did a piece on this kind of stuff in the US. It’s an interesting watch. Both the “donate to science” and organ donation routes are important, however both are also flawed.

https://youtu.be/Tn7egDQ9lPg

This doesn’t provide an answer, but seems relevant. John Oliver did a piece on the loose nature of “donating my body to science” and also the issues with the current organ donation system in the US.

https://youtu.be/Tn7egDQ9lPg

The holes don’t actually do anything. https://youtu.be/udNXMAflbU8

An average EV consumes .32 kilowatt hours of electricity per mile. If you are driving 60 miles per hour, that means you are spending 19.2 kilowatt hours of electricity every hour. So you need a generator that’s at least 19.2 kilowatt. Tack on some more because you are now towing the extra weight of a generator and because you are probably wanting to go 70mph and let’s just say you need 25 kilowatts. This is what a towable 25kw generator looks like. It costs $22k. I’m sure cheaper ones could be made, but even at $10k, is it worth it? Just buy some plane tickets or rent a gas car for a week or take a train.

https://herogenerators.com/products/25-kw-caterpillar-towable-diesel-generator

For much of the country in terms of land maybe, but not in terms of people. Most people live in or near high population areas where using an EV is fine. The person in question saying that fear mongering needs to stop was the governor of Connecticut. Connecticut is not Oklahoma. There is zero reason to fear monger range anxiety in Connecticut.

But even for people in places like Oklahoma, there’s a couple things you should consider. First is, don’t rush out and buy an EV just because you feel like you’re being told to. Only buy an EV once your existing vehicle is no longer viable. Buying a new car when your old one still works is not very green. But definitely consider an EV when the time comes, even if you have range anxiety. Why? For one, the money you will save on gas can allow you to rent a gas car for those long trips you need to make and then you don’t have to put those extra miles on your own car. Remember, tires are expensive and wear down with miles driven. Or, with the money saved from gas, you could take a bus, a train, or possibly even an airplane. Or if you really don’t want to do any of that, you could probably find a buddy who still has a gas car and trade for the week. Just because you buy an electric vehicle, doesn’t mean you are now locked out of ever using a different kind of transportation. But number 2? Over the coming years, EV infrastructure will be constantly increasing. Yeah, some states are being regressive at the moment, but they will turn around. So even in places were range anxiety is legitimate, it won’t be a problem for much longer, except in those edge cases where even a gas car currently has issues, but since even a gas car has issues, it doesn’t make a difference. And third? There are so many companies working on battery tech right now, it’s crazy. Some are working on higher energy density so we can get longer range, others are working on better materials so we can stop using unethically acquired minerals, some are working on making batteries that function better in the cold. None of this helps the car you buy today, but it will help the car you buy in 5 years.

Estimate includes property taxes.

Someone (possibly recently?) figured out the protocol and how to register a phone number without needing an apple device. Older versions of stuff like this required having a Mac virtual machine and routing messages through it using a user’s AppleID, so this was much easier. I saw a video that was bragging about how this new method would be very difficult to block because doing so could affect regular users, and I just kinda laughed at the naivety.

For most people it will be things like tax documents, medical receipts (assuming you are in a country where that’s important), photos of kids’ life milestones, photos of family members who have passed away, copies of leases, receipts for large purchases for insurance purposes if your house burns down. Things like that. Also, if you do freelance work like web design, photography, video editing, writing, music production, game design, research, etc, you want to make sure that stuff is backed up.

For any really important data, you should always have at least 3 copies. 1) Your working copy on your computer. 2) A local backup which could be an external hard drive, a NAS, another computer, or whatever. 3) An off-site backup. That could be a cloud service, a computer at a friend’s or family member’s house, an external hard drive in a safety deposit box, etc. The off-site backup is in case your house burns down or is robbed.

If it’s REALLY important, you may have even more than that. There’s also the issue of how often do you update the backups. A hard drive in a safety deposit box is hard to update compared to uploading to Google Drive which can be automatic, but the hard drive in the safety deposit box is more secure. So you have to weigh your pros and cons.