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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • I have a child and I’d be the first to recommend not having one. It’s expensive, it wrecked me emotionally and physically, and I worry every day about what kind of world my kid will grow up into.

    But all those things are worth it in the end to me because I really wanted to be a parent. My kid is an absolute treasure to me and I put up with the suffering because I do genuinely love parenting and love seeing him grow up. If I was any less enthusiastic about the process going in, I would have either run away or killed myself by now. That’s how demoralizing and traumatic parenting can be. Granted I have a special needs kid but so do probably 10% of parents so do you want to roll those dice?

    All that aside, the fact is that parenting these days is filled with societal obstacles. With both parents working, you’re rationing sick days and constantly running out, leaving no time for vacation or personal days off. This leaves the option of either taking unpaid days off or reducing one’s working hours. Since no one is home doing housework all day, working parents spend their evenings and nights doing housework. If you need to run an errand or take the kid to a doctor’s appointment, that comes out of either your paid work time or your free time. Childcare is both expensive and hard to get, with wait-lists for daycares in some cities of several months. And once your kid is in public school, you have to find after school care, which is not guaranteed for every kid at every school.

    And don’t even get me started about summer. Three months of cobbled-together summer camps and asking/begging family members and friends to watch your kid when their busy schedules permit. If your kid has special needs or requires trained caregivers, you are out of luck.

    These are fixable problems, but they require massive government-subsidized investment in childcare and parental leave structures and the government is not doing that. Childcare salaries are so low that the supply of daycare teachers is basically dried up. Same with public school teachers and afterschool caregivers. Why work as an afterschool teacher when you can be an independent nanny and make twice as much per hour? As for parental leave, there is no requirement that parental leave cover anything beyond the bare bones of the time needed to give birth, leaving most new parents to burn through their entire year’s worth of sick time during their babies first month of life when there is a doctor’s appointment just about every week. Then blow through it again next year when the kid gets sick twice a month in daycare. My kid is six years old and this is the first year I haven’t run out of sick days before June.

    Our society was designed for families with at least one full-time caregiver, and now that is basically impossible but the system has not been updated. This game is not designed for us. So why would anyone choose to play?







  • Advantages of bras:

    • Look nice (if you’re into that look, which many people are)

    • Keep your nipples from chafing

    • Support/containment for larger boobs

    • Keep prudish people from being mad at your nipples

    • Can be worn without a shirt for sports if they cover enough real estate

    • When breastfeeding, help catch/absorb leaks

    Disadvantages of bras:

    • Uncomfortable if not fitted right
    • Sweaty as fuck on hot days
    • Expensive
    • Many have to be hand washed if they are fancy

    I would say I wear bras about 30-50% of the time and it’s usually for either support/chafing prevention or looks. The rest of the time I can’t be bothered. I’m also lucky to not have super large breasts. I know women who do may find a good fitted bra to be more comfortable than no bra.

    When I was breastfeeding I wore them all the time though because it is super awkward to leak through your shirt in public.

    Edited to add bullet points bc I suck at lemmy formatting


  • Cucumbers need a lot of direct sun and a lot of space, either vertical (trellised) or horizontal (along the ground). Put them in a wide open sunny part of your yard. They’re also fairly susceptible to powdery mildew so keep an eye on them if the weather is rainy.

    You mentioned you’re in Maine, which means you have a relatively short growing season. You might want to start your cucumber seeds inside to get a jump start on the season in the spring. Otherwise just make sure you get them started right away once it’s okay to plant outdoors so that you don’t run out of room at the end of the season.

    Good luck and let us know how it goes! Cucumbers are a very rewarding plant, right up there with tomatoes for me as far as bang for your buck. Homegrown cucumbers have a crunch that totally knocks store bought ones out of the park.

    Other vegetables I like growing that grow well in my corner of New England: Basil (grow enough to make several batches of pesto and freeze it) Tomatoes Sugar snap peas Leafy greens, especially collards and Swiss Chard Potatoes in 5-gallon buckets Hot peppers




  • Cisgender woman here, I just wanted to add that if my husband were to come out as trans, that would not be a tragedy or something I wished he’d gotten figured out sooner for my sake. In this hypothetical scenario, if it somehow managed to make us incompatible as married partners we’d deal with it but people have gotten divorced for much worse reasons before. The worst part for me would be worrying if he’d been miserable during our marriage, because I love him and would hate for that to be his experience of our time together.

    It’s really hard to imagine because AFAIK we’re both cis but personally I’d probably prefer to stay married to my spouse even if he changed his gender identity. I mean he’s still the same person I married and we still love the same things and have a wonderful life and child together. I dunno, maybe it wouldn’t work out in the end but I sure as hell wouldn’t be mad at him for something he couldn’t change.

    Anyways, my point is you don’t have to assume that your relationships with cis people will all get blown up if you do happen to be trans. I appreciate the urge to have your ducks all in a row before embarking on significant life events but the truth is that marriage and adulthood is super messy anyways. If you marry someone and have a kid with them the odds are good you will have all sorts of chaotic events to deal with- physical illnesses, mental illnesses, kid stress or illness, weight gain or loss, money trouble, job changes, changes in personality with age, the list goes on and on. The trick to being happily married is rolling with the changes, working hard at your partnership, and being committed to your partner, not having it all perfectly lined up at the start.




  • You would need a pretty big solar array to power a construction site with it. But you’re headed in the right direction. Not only is it an option to use renewables to power battery-powered vehicles, but also pretty much any form of electricity generation increases in efficiency and decreases in emissions (per kilowatt generated) as it scales up. Even if you are burning the same fuel at the power plant, the emissions are going to be lower overall than the equivalent number of individual internal combustion engines because the efficiency of the power plant is much higher than an ICE. Vehicle engines are ridiculously inefficient overall and when you use a more efficient fuel like natural gas it is even more drastic of a difference.

    It’s also much easier to put stack controls on a power plant to capture or reduce emissions than it is to put emissions controls on all construction equipment individually. This has implications for carbon capture, which could happen right at the stack. However, there’s a non-climate change benefit here as well which is that the local air quality would be greatly increased around construction sites. Currently most construction equipment does not have much in the way of emissions controls for other things like sulfur and nitrogen oxides or particulate emissions. Power plants have to meet emissions standards for all of these.