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How can I convince my kids in 5 years that they do not need or want to have one just to fit in, and that they're too expensive and most people will regret having them for various reasons?

Do things that get them to respect your values and opinions. There is no argument you can provide that will convince them if that foundation isn't there.

I'll also give you a different perspective, since there are many people who are anti-tattoo here. If you really hate the idea of tattoos on your kids, you can consider my point of view and work against it for maximum protection. Personally, I would say your post is a great argument against bad tattoos, and making permanent decisions based on peer pressure. Hopefully your kids don't fall into either of those traps. It's important for you to instill a good sense of taste and self-assuredness in them - that may or may not mean that they end up getting into tattoo culture, but hopefully that means they avoid a saggy butterfly tramp stamp.

I only recently got into tattoos, and I am in my 30s. I had no desire in my younger years - my earliest memory of a tattoo was a no-longer-recognizable rose on my mum, which she didn't like, and I thought was weird. I recently got into tattoos because I am very familiar with my body, and I like art. Now I can get a tattoo and see cool art any time I want, and I don't miss having bare skin (I might have when I was younger). It's a similar experience to something like carrying a nice pocket knife (which I also do when I am working). I can take it out, look at it, and it brightens my day a little every time. And similar to a nice pocket knife, I expect it will last decades, and change over time. Do I expect it to look the same for decades? Definitely not, but seeing the change is part of the experience. Old tattoos have a certain charm for some people, just like grandpa's over-sharpened slipjoint.

Of course there are people who get tattoos for the image of being a gangster or individualualist (and of course there is an irony to the latter that they will never understand). The majority of tattoos, like the majority of any cultural expression, reflect bad taste (as you note with your examples). But I think that's a bad argument, because it doesn't apply to everyone, and even the people it does apply to won't think that is does. I think tattoos have become ubiquitous in part because they allow anyone to showcase their taste. Whether it's good or bad, that's irrelevant. What matters is finding people who share it or respect it, and tattoos do that well. They can be an immediate talking point, and for people who are really into tattoos, they are a hobby like any other to bond over - both the result on your skin, and the experience of getting them.

The other aspect to their popularity is that no one can take them away. You note their longevity as a negative point, but that's a selling point for many. Go back to the pocket knife example - they are durable, can be beautiful, and are certainly more useful than a tattoo. But they are also extremely easy to lose, and produced in large numbers (well, aside for extremely expensive customs). And tattoos fill a gap that is hard to fill in contemporary life: modification, which is an external representation of change that you enact on your surroundings. Some people like modifying their cars, some people like modifying their homes, and some like working in their gardens. But the fact is that tattoos can be less expensive than any of these, and are more accessible and meaningful for many. Many younger people can't afford their own spaces, which means they can't meaningfully modify their environments to reflect their tastes - but they can modify their bodies.

So maybe get your kids into landscaping?

Aside from having some form of output (if they are prone to needing that) and building a foundation of respect for your opinion as their parent, you have to protect them from the notion that tattoos are normal. That's tough because eventually you will have no control over their social circle, and many normal people have tattoos these days. Having friends or colleagues with tattoos is the biggest impact, I would guess. I started getting tattooed because my partner has tattoos, and I wanted to have that shared experience. I think that is something different from peer pressure. It's not the idea that you should do something because others want you to do it, but the idea that you can do something because you want to and the people you respect won't judge you for it.

Good luck.

I've noticed the best women I meet on dating apps downloaded it about a week ago, haven't been on a date yet, and are about to delete it because it's overwhelming.

Right, its quite possible Foster was threatening Perry. Or even he was about to shoot him. It's just nowhere near as clear as Rittenhouse and just angling your gun down as you would anyway can't be as clearly dispositive.

I think Foster was stupid for bring a rifle at all, but thats neither here nor there.

The prior incidents of protesters shooting at cars is all well and good, but they're only relevant if the defendant knew about them and they influenced his decision, and the only way to admit that evidence is if he testifies to it himself. While that evidence may have helped his case, that help almost certainly would have been outweighed by the fact that he'd have to testify and open himself up to cross examination, which almost never ends well.

Can you elaborate on this behaviour?

As far as I understand it from our very long threads back in the day the law in Wisconsin doesn't specify you have to defend yourself in the smartest way. If someone points a gun at you, running may well be the smart play, but if you choose to fight, you still can claim self defense. That is why the prosecution were trying to establish Rosenbaum had the gun pointed at him prior to him charging.

IF Rittenhouse had openly threatened Rosenbaum, charging him would have been legally permissible, though stupid.

I don't have much experience dating East Asians, but one did ask me to be her boyfriend on the third date before we'd even kissed. I thought that was odd.

These girls also have their preference profiles shaped by the most asinine Kdrama shit, and their expectations for male behavior are simultaneously low and ridiculously high.

As someone with zero familiarity with K-dramas, I'm interested to know what this means.

But if you can't have your rifle pointed down, because that threatens a person seated below you, then that means the general freedom to open carry a rifle is severely circumscribed. In a city there will always be cars around.

In fact in the hours that Rittenhouse was walking around we have images him of gun angled down walking past an occupied car. If that is enough to trigger threat then the occupant could have shot him!

My point is that on its own should be ok. If it is ok to open carry a rifle then we must accept some people will have it angled towards them. Rittenhouse in the image has his gun pointed at the legs of the man next to him. Unless you are always pointing your gun directly vertically down, its just a statisical certainty. So if open carrying rifles is legal, then that cannot be the standard.

You can legally in Texas walk up to a car with a rifle open carried. The question is does that mean when doing the safe thing, and pointing it down, you are automatically threatening the occupant because you could shoot them in seconds? I say the answer logically has to be no, in order for the legal carry right to make any sense.

Now to be clear that does not mean Foster wasn't actually threatening Perry! He may well of been and certainly previous testimony might make that more likely. But it can't come solely from walking towards an occupied vehicle with your gun angled down. Because that is I am given to understand (and as Rittenhouse did!) the safer way to point it. Is he supposed to raise it? Because that seems more likely to trigger a response. If open carrying is legal you can walk towards people legally, you can walk past them, you can ealk up to their car window and knock on it. You can ask them for the time or pet their dog.

My point is not that Foster was not threatening Perry, but that the description of WHY it was a threat seems biased. If Perry was threatened it was not because the gun was simply angled down and he is lower, it has to be because it was actively pointed at him. That was the determination in the Rittenhouse trial, that merely turning with your gun angled down such that it is passing a trajectory where you could shoot someone can't count as being actively threatened so Rosenbaum could not have been defending himself. Whether the gun is pointing at your leg or your body because you are sitting down doesn't matter.

If we want to claim that Perry was legally threatened then it has to be because Foster was aiming at him. Not just holding the gun in his general direction. And the problem is, from the images we have we can't see that, which is why Nybbler has to fall back to the gun being angled down being a threat because that is all we can make out. He is inflating the level of evidence we have. Again to be clear it is entirely possible Foster was pointing his gun right at Perry. And if so Perry would be justified in seeing that as a threat. Likewise in a state where open carry of rifles is not permitted maybe the walking towards you carrying a rifle pointed close to you might be a threat. But if you are going to legalize open carry of long arms, they WILL be angled towards people at some point (seriously go watch the pre-shooting footage of Kenosha, particularly when some of the "militia" are standing and walking together, their barrels are angled down but pass trajectories of peoples legs all the time) and if that legally counts as a threat, there is a serious mismatch, that risks inciting incidents. (Assuming we are allowing open carry, I don't think it should count for the record.) That is true even if Foster was about to shoot Perry in cold blood (and he might have been!).

I'm not complaining that people are defending Perry. More that they are pitching certainties or potentially reasonable things as absolute proof. Such that there is no chance the jury was actually correct.

To be clear, just as I think it was dumb of Rittenhouse to be wandering around a protest with a rifle regardless of whether he did anything legally wrong, then Foster was just as stupid, possibly more so. I don't think its a huge loss he got shot. Though I am sure as it always is it is a loss to his family. Attending protests has risk, attending openly armed inflates the risk that someone will take exception. Possibly Rittenhouse is only alive because Rosenbaum was not armed. And in the US, that is not a good gamble, as Foster perhaps learned...well briefly.

Also I keep typing Genosha instead of Kenosha, so if any made it through, I apologise.

I think indigenous people have far more children than any of those groups.

?He's set for a jury trial in 2025!? Nice problem to have if you're out on bail, but what the ever-living fuck.

There looks to have been some process stuff -- what looks like a pretty questionable police-tossed-my-evidence back and forth that took a several months, and a judge recusing because his brother-in-law turned out to be involved in analyzing the case -- but that's still nearly New York City levels of delay.

The girls on Coffee Meets Bagel a very disproportionately Asian in my experience.

I would agree with you. Though I think Rittenhouse did himself no favors in his testimony because he said as Rosenbaum charged him, he did point the gun at him to try and scare him off. Then ran, when he kept charging, then shot him when he was getting close. Had the jury felt he HAD initially threatened Rosenbaum, the second (admitted) threat might have been viewed to show that Rosenbaum might have believed Rittenhouse would have got more distance then turned the gun on him again. A podcast I was listening to at the time was concerned he had just given them a reason to convict. Though that turned out not to be the case of course.

Rosenbaum was i think unstable, and looking for trouble, so whether Rittenhouse did have his barrel angled somewhere near him was probably the excuse he was looking for.

Women are looking for a good-looking, confident but humble, respectful and unconditionally loving confidant who earns more than them...

Men are looking for a harem of sweet, nubile girls who'll provide stress-free sex on tap. Or perhaps a nice, pretty, forever-loyal tradwife who'll stay at home and raise children.

Nobody is going to get what they want unless they're very lucky or high-value. There are trade-offs. The tradwife probably isn't going to be that good looking. The harem girls are probably most interested in your wealth. The good-looking men are hard to lock down. The 'nice guys' aren't so attractive, physically or socially.

It's English. Or at least ebonics haha. I don't think I've ever used Bengali over here.

Alright, so what would be a “good sign”?

Assuming that the evidence was genuinely unclear, I don’t see how the scissor can be avoided. Either the initial conviction was unjust, or the pardon was. This isn’t new to Current Year.

I suppose I find it a bit premature to say people aren’t accepting his pardon. On Twitter, sure. Until someone denies him a job as if he were still a murderer—or until Jack Ruby shows up to launch a conspiracy theory—I’d say law and order are holding together.

Sounds like good reasons not to be a lawyer

Badgering women into having sex with you after they've said no is apparently fine in some people's minds.

To move away from drunk hookups into committed relationships, there is this kind of issue where libidos don't always match and as such some accommodation must be reached where either:

  1. The low-libido partner (usually but not always the woman) agrees to have sex more in exchange for some consideration,
  2. The high-libido partner (usually but not always the man) agrees to have sex less in exchange for some consideration, or
  3. Both agree on some middle ground.

One issue I've seen with a decent amount of feminist thought (including, to some extent, the article under discussion) is that it declares agreement #2 exploitative and defends women's right to outright renege on agreements #1 and #3 without consequence (as consequences are a form of coercion). That doesn't leave any zone of possible agreement.

I'm not saying it's alright to ignore a "no", but... there are circumstances where "no" is an arsehole move.

That was the focus of the prosecution that he was cauding people to feel hreatened, which was the contention on why Rosenbaum may have felt threatened and c harged Rittenhouse and thus had a self defence claim.

The problem is the link you're smuggling in between "feeling threatened" and "charging." Not "shoving someone away from you" or "running away" or "hiding" but "charging". Actively running towards the person who you think is threatening you.

What struck me about this article was how completely different her university experience was to mine. I never had sex in university. I never even went on a date, though did occasionally get drunk at parties and make out with girls.

I never talked about sex with my parents and only very rarely with my friends, and certainly not in any detail. I didn't even watch porn. The university didn't lecture us about consent. I didn't read about it on the internet. I didn't have a well developed theory (sex positive or otherwise) about how consent, dating or sex were supposed to work. Most of what I knew came from TV and movies. I only had vague ideas about how things were supposed to work, and I struggled to form a coherent understanding of courtship by piecing together conflicting clues. The whole subject was a mystery to me, and seemed almost fantastical, something which on some level I didn't really believe would ever be relevant to my life.

I did start dating and having sex in my late twenties and tried to educate myself by reading the internet, but nothing like the craziness this girl describes took place. She is really describing an alien world to me. It might be because I am ten years older than her, but I wonder if something equally crazy was taking place at my alma mater while I focused on studying. I certainly would never have guessed that anything like this was happening.

Also, my friends who did date mostly had a series of monogamous relationships. There wasn't that much hooking up, at least that I knew of.

she happily took an OF career over a law career.

This doesn't tell you anything. I graduated with decent grades from a T-15 law school in a major US metropolitan area and didn't crack $80k/yr for several years out of law school. Lawyer pay is extremely bimodal, and there's a lot of people who get their newly-minted JD only to find themselves with 5 or 6-figure debts but making significantly less than the Assistant Manager at the local Panda Express.

Below someone said that because Foster had his gun angled down, but could have pointed it directly at Perry and fired in an instant that Perry was correct to have felt threatened. But we have video of Rittenhouse wandering around gun pointed low where he also could have brought it up and fired at any of the people around him.

I'll point to Cornered Cat for a summary that's focused on a not-lawyers-not-legal-advise, but the tripod of ability-opportunity-jeopardy is common to a much broader ethos among Red Tribers. Someone being physically able to harm you can't be a threat on its own, or everyone from a police officer to a car driver to a stick holder is cause for justifiable self-defense. Someone who says they'll hurt you can't be a threat on its own, or a trash-talking Call of Duty player would be justifiable self-defense. It's the combination of both that make for justifiable self-defense.

I think the situation for Perry is a lot more unclear, not least of all because of the low quality of all available video. But having people beating on your car doors and windows is a lot closer on jeopardy than a rando giving out bandaids (as, importantly, was Perry's driving!). Maybe not enough, and I'm disappointed that neither Abbot nor the parole board seem interested in explaining the evidence they found so compelling. But enough that it seems to be a big missing factor in a lot of the discussions and comparisons.

((That said, in turn, Rittenhouse is an obscenely good shoot for reasons that have been covered elsewhere; he set a standard that is wildly above the minimum for lawful self-defense.))

I got about halfway through before I called it quits because it got repetitive.

I like the comparison of the spotting plane to the drone. One thing that exists in this war that didn't in World War One is the possibility of deep strike (cruise missiles, ballistic missiles) which means that massed assaults (cut down in WW1 by machine-guns and tube artillery) can be defeated before even reaching the lines.

On the topic of good sources, in my very limited experience, I'd recommend the Royal United Services Institute, they actually sent some guys over to Ukraine to talk to the Ukrainians. RAND probably remains one of the best places to read the rough draft of history before it happens.

I don't read this stuff religiously, but I've found what I have read on the Russo-Ukraine War (something like one paper from each source!) to be interesting.

I've got more written but this is taking quite a bit of research to do the way I want to do it and I've been unusually busy for the past month so my apologies for not getting the installments out sooner. In the meantime, I owe you answers to your questions.

Does CMU being the best CS university in the world affect the day to day of the average person in Pittsburgh? For example, the JHU's excellence at Medicine or Clemson at Automobile Engg. defintely seems to affect the economic makeup of their respective cities.

Not unless you live near campus, but I doubt that's the kind of influence you're talking about. I have a friend who works at the robotics lab but his place of employment makes no difference in my life. The so-called city fathers hype up our tech prowess all the time, but I'm guessing that all cities with any kind of tech industry do that, and Pittsburgh is still like 18th in number of tech jobs, so I'm inclined to say that any influence is minimal. The one exception may be in East Liberty; it gets a lot of hype for being recently gentrified and having a Google office near there, but for all the housing they're building I've never heard of anyone actually living there, and normal people don't hype the area up like they do other trendy areas. That's more of a discussion for the installment on East Liberty (there's certainly a lot to unpack there), but off the top of my head I'd guess that all the apartments are rented by techbros without social lives, which is why I haven't heard of anyone wanting to move there.

Does Pittsburgh ever feel like a college town? Upitt + CMU makes for 50k students not that far from downtown.

And Duquesne just outside of Downtown, and Point Park in Downtown, and Carlow right next to Pitt, and you get the idea. So yeah; any remotely trendy part of the East End with decent bus service is going to have a relatively high number of student renters, particularly grad students. I've never heard of any of them wanting to live in East Liberty, though. The only part that feels like an actual college town, though is Oakland, where you're right on campus, but being in the city makes it qualitatively different than if you're in a town that revolves around a huge state school in the middle of nowhere. I'll go into greater detail in the section on Oakland.

I've seen Pittsburgh compared to Seattle wrt weather, hilliness, whiteness and having tech. How fair is the comparison ?

I've never been to Seattle so take my response with a grain of salt, but I think it's reasonably fair. The climates are probably comparably dreary, but here we actually have 4 seasons with hot summers and cold winters. Our climate is mild compared to places like the Rockies and interior New England, but we're quite cold and snowy for a major American city. Culturally, though, I don't think that Seattle has the working class industrial history that gives Pittsburgh its sense of grit. I'd also wager that they're a lot less "ethnic" than we are; everybody here is Catholic and has names like Bob Schlydeki and Larry Deldino and you can still smoke in bars here. People I've know who moved here from Seattle are surprised by the amount of industry that still exists and the fact that working class people actually have accents. Most had assumed that the mills had died completely and that accents were an affectation from television that nobody had anymore.