Most units of time are based on nature. A day is one rotation of the Earth. A month is the moon’s orbit. A year is the Earth’s path around the sun.

But a week? There’s no natural explanation for it.

Well, given that a moon cycle is about 28 days long, each quarter of that is 7 days. Before we had electric lights at night, most people were very aware of the moon phase.

Now I've actually finished the article. That intro just ticked me off enough that I needed to say something before continuing. :-P

The study they cited shows that, surprise surprise, people need a break. That makes total sense. But the whole 55 hours a week thing? They seem to be advocating for people going to work for 55 hours a week, rather than the typical 40 hours for a full-time job. That's total baloney, though. There is so much work to do outside of my job. They mentioned volunteering and child rearing, but what about the basic work to live?

People have to eat, so they have to prepare food. They have to go to the grocery store. They have to do laundry. They have to clean their house. If they have a yard, there is yard work. There is time spent grooming oneself. If a person has kids, they may need to help their kids with homework. People have to shop for other necessities, like clothes. People spend time commuting to and from work. There is so much necessary stuff to do outside of a job that I would consider "work" because it's neither sleeping nor leisure.

So what is the point of this article? "God was right" that people need a break sometimes? Or "God was right" that the break should only be one day in 7? Are they seriously advocating for moving to a 55-hour work week?

The way they read into the scripture verse was really weird, too. They pulled a lot of meaning that's not textually there out of "Six days thou shalt work." The act of working has some inherent value now beyond what you're actually accomplishing? They're also conflating people not wanting to do any work with people not liking their jobs. Sure, a person could find meaning in being a janitor at a hospital, but not all jobs have some net social benefit like that. A person working at a call center to scam people doesn't have any deeper meaning to find and doesn't have to like their job.

The whole thing sounds like they're saying that everyone needs to shut up and be abused at work, working long hours, and if we're not happy about it, it's our own fault for not liking our jobs, and we need to suck it up and get with the program because Fox News said that God said so.

No thanks.

Well, if Musk said it, it must be true. /s

My kid was diagnosed as autistic at 15 because their therapist suggested getting them evaluated. They asked me recently why we didn't get them evaluated sooner.

After reading up about autism and talking to the therapist and reading the evaluation writeup, I realized that my husband, our other kid, my dad, and I are all definitely autistic, as is my step-father-in-law. A lot of our friends are diagnosed with some variety of neurodivergence (autism, ADHD, severe OCD), and probably some of the undiagnosed ones are also neurodivergent.

I told this to my kid and ended with, "So you seemed normal to us."

Obviously I don't have any insight in your case, but my guess is that a lot of parents don't consider that their kid might be autistic because they don't realize that there's anything unusual.

That's not the difference. Both words have noun and verb forms.

Immigrate = to move to a place

Emigrate = to move from a place

Immigrant = a person who moved to a place

Emigrant = a person who moved from a place

So they would be emigrating from the US and immigrating to Italy. They would be a US emigrant and an Italian immigrant.

As a kid, I had a small dictionary, so I checked whether "gullible" was in it in order to mess with my little sister. It wasn't there, but I still got in trouble when my mom overheard me telling my sister, "Did you know gullible is not in this dictionary?"

I was miffed because I was telling the truth.

You mean the Bell Riots that started September 1, 2024? I'm not sure how to tell you this, but that didn't happen on schedule.

You have non-stressful dreams? Lucky.

It's eth, actually, not thorn.

I had thought that eth was used in Old English for the voiced "th" and thorn for the unvoiced "th", but Wikipedia says they were used interchangeably for both sounds.

You're right otherwise. Thorn was not available on printing presses because they were being made in countries that didn't use the letter, which is why the letter Y was used instead until "th" became more common.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eth

That font looks like Open Dyslexic, which is designed to be easier to read for people with dyslexia. So no, this isn't AI just based on the font.

https://opendyslexic.org/

I don't really like reading things with that font, though. I have a harder time with it. I prefer Atkinson Hyperlegible for an easily-readable font.

https://www.brailleinstitute.org/freefont/

"Thong" can mean a type of sandal, also known as flip-flops, but it's also the name of a type of underwear or swimsuit bottom that's basically a string in the back.

I grew up calling flip flops "thongs", but as I got older, people were almost exclusively using that term for the underwear, so I switched terms to avoid confusion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip-flops https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thong

Dude.

The cream would rehydrate them.

Westley was also a viewer-insert character for kids to relate to. As a little kid watching TNG, I liked him as a character and thought he was cute. I didn't start to find him irritating until I got a few years older than him.

the output is always going to be an average of the input recipes.

Yeah, that's a problem for most recipes, especially baking.

That's pretty good, but..... how much pie crust does it make? The recipe only says to roll out one circle of crust, and then once the filling is in it, suddenly you're crimping the edges of the top crust to the bottom. It's missing crucial steps and information.

I would never knowingly use an AI-generated recipe. I'd much rather search for one that an actual human has used, and even then, I read through it to make sure it makes sense and steps aren't missing.

Not everything is available on streaming. Even things that are available might not be on the services they have subscribed to. Also, while DVDs often have a "play all" option, you can typically play a single episode, and it will stop when it's over, which is pretty useful for helping to limit how long the kids are watching TV.

Taking a drug that doesn't work is not necessarily the same as taking a placebo. I have suffered a lot from drug side effects, and some have hurt me long-term, years after I stopped taking the medicine. I am incredibly wary of taking anything new, even before all the horrors of 2025. With even worse approval processes, I expect that a lot of harmful and potentially debilitating or deadly stuff is going to end up on pharmacy shelves soon.

And quantifying it.

I have it on pretty good authority that everyone

That's where your comment went wrong. Just about everything that anyone claims "everyone" does is false. Maybe "lots of people," "most people," or even "by far, most people" do a thing, but literally "everyone"? BS.

I don't like looking at breasts, and I have absolutely no interest in them.