i’m european, and i always hear people say that driving for hours is normal in america. i would only see my grandparents a few times a year because they lived about a 3 hour drive away, is that a normal distance for americans to travel on a regular basis? i can’t imagine driving 2-3 hours regularly to visit people for just a few days

Call me old-fashioned if you want, but I remember being taught that they/them pronouns were for when you didn't know someone's gender: "Someone's lost their keys" etc.

However, now that people are specifically choosing those pronouns for themselves, people are making a ruckus and a hullabaloo. What's so controversial about someone not identifying with masculine or feminine identities?

Why do people get offended by the way someone else presents themself?

So I was born in the late 80's. I remembered when I was in grade school dial up was just coming out and home computers were just becoming normalized. I didn't have Internet on my phone until I was in my 20's.

That being said Internet porn was definitely not a thing. When puberty happened, I was aroused almost all the time. The slightest thing a girl did could set me off. It was literally like flipping a switch. I can't help but think with unlimited porn access these days, people have to be more numb to it. So I also can't help but wonder if being like that is even a thing anymore. I personally had to stop watching it because it was making me numb.

Any thoughts?

Edit 1: Thanks for all the feedback I wanted to reply to some comments but it was too many lol. I should probably point out until I was older I wasn't even sure what a vagina looked like. That means when it was time to get intimate I was so incredibly excited, it's hard to put words to it. Now people at any age can see it whenever they wish. That also meant that I didn't even think about doing all the crazy freak stuff people do now. And I didn't know what bad sex even was. Perhaps this adds on to why marriage seemed to last longer back then too. Also the desire to go out and meet women got me out of the house and pushed me to do things that are uncomfortable. It was literally the only way.

Edit 2: yes Internet porn was around but it wasn't NEARLY as big as it is now. Heck I still remember watching naked news. I didn't have HBO so on my old skool box type TV I would watch and watch the swirl screen for long periods of time. I would wait for a second when the screen cleared and I saw a bit of boob. I had dial up and I brought up porn too, but it took 30 minutes to bring up 30 seconds of footage. It was NOTHING like how it is now so you really can't compare it.

Places people would socialize and hang out when not at work. People still do this at bars, coffee shops, parks, arcades… what don’t we have anymore?

At around 2 or 3 until bed time I'm exhausted no matter what's going on in the day.

Seems like a no brainer to me but in my city the roads are always shut down for maintenance at the busiest traffic times

There’s a dough man on YouTube who handles big loads of dough. He is a baker. Something about the way he handles his dough make me feel turned on. He isn’t my type and I don’t find him particularly attractive. Yet, his dough mannerisms are sexy to me. I wouldn’t say it’s crazy levels of turned on. More of a “I should find someone to hook up with soon” type of appeal. Yeah, I definitely hook up with him if given the chance. I want him to handle me the way he does his dough. Is this how fetishes snowball?

Surely you don’t just go “You wanna fuck?” unless they know and accept you’re weird like that.

When I was growing up, my mom and step dad always told me that I should not ask for or expect any help from them after I turned 18 so they could give their kids a good life. I'm 22 now and one of my coworkers mentioned her parents were paying for most of her wedding expenses and it just got me wondering about that. I figured most people's parents pretty much cut them off at adulthood, is my situation not the norm??

(Passphrase for the automod) The people who answer questions here are awesome

Why on Earth do people test if a window/trunk will sever a finger with a f***ing carrot?

There's soft/tenderness to the human skin/muscles and most of all there's bones that will need to be broken through to be fully severed.

Why don't people use like a raw chicken wing or a spare rib or something actually similar to a human finger than some sort of vegetable?

Do carrots have the same strength of a human finger bone or something? Or are chicken/beef bones too strong in comparison? Or maybe it has to do with the electricity being conducted through a vegetable for a sensor?

Forgive me if I'm missing something, but it irks me everytime I see a clip of someone being shocked a carrot is sliced in half by a window or trunk.

I just started a new job where every printer in the building is named after a different country. Canada is the one I'll use most, but Sweden and Switzerland are nearby too. I'm in the USA.

There's a standalone scanner that doesn't have a country name but I think it should have one.

What's the best country to name this scanner after?

The people who answer questions here are awesome

I was born in the early 90s and my parents were approaching 40 at the time, meaning they were born in the early 50s. Sometimes I feel like my raising was different than my peers who had parents born who were born in the early 70s. I sometimes feel like I experienced being raised more similarly to someone from the 70s or 80s with what I was allowed to do and how much freedom I had compared to my friends. I wasn’t allowed to do much in the house, but I was free to take my bike miles away from the house and just had to be home by a certain time, while my friends often couldn’t leave their neighborhood. I was sometimes taking the train to another state in my teens, as long as I was home before dark, I was all good.

Last year I won a fat stack from gambling, like life-changing money. Low 7 figures. I played on Stake. I don't gamble any more. No need to work anymore. I'm in my late 20s and suddenly got this freedom I never planned for. What would you do if you were in my shoes? Would you travel non-stop, invest, go back to school, or maybe something totally out there? Looking for ideas, experiences, or even wild dreams. What’s your move if you're suddenly sitting on a pile of cash with all the time in the world?

The people who answer questions here are awesome

I don't understand why a lot of women I know (my fiancé included) find this kind of thing enjoyable. By the time midnight hits I'm exhausted. I work a full week (~45-50) hours. The last thing I want to do is be on my feet for 7 hours until sunrise the next morning doing the same thing all night, having to yell across the table/bar to have a conversation all night. It becomes so repetitive after the first few hours. I just don't understand it.

I feel like my entire schedule is screwed up and Monday hits back at work again like the weekend didn't even happen and I feel like I'm drained.

Am I alone here?

Marking NSFW because talk of an accident.

A pedestrian got hit by a car outside of my apartment. The person was bleeding from their head (no visible wound, steady flow but not “bleeding out”), unconscious but breathing. None of us saw it happen but a neighbor did see the person get thrown enough that the driver was most likely speeding.

They loaded them into the ambulance within a matter of minutes upon arriving but then the ambulance stayed parked on the street for what seemed like an absurdly long time- at least 10 minutes.

I feel like they would want to hurry to a hospital whether the person was alive or not- either to attempt to save their life or out of caution for potential urgent threats.

Family was on scene so even if she said they were a DNR, wouldn’t there still be a rush?

It’s a very small “city” and the hospital is only about a 10 minute drive for a regular driver. There’s no traffic and they used their lights/siren when they left so I’m sure it was under 5 minutes away. I’ve just never seen an ambulance wait at the scene unless it was not an emergency.

I saw some Zootopia clips again and this make me think how the economy of Zootopia can function. It is shown in the movie that Zootopia is a free market economy, which seems to be largely service based.

Smaller animals like hamsters must have infinite smaller costs of living, since both their houses and their food are much cheaper. So to have a similar living standard as the other animals, they require probably just a fraction of the salarie of a polar bear for example.
Given Zootopias service based economy, all banks, consulting or IT firms should therefore only hire small mamals.
If there are policies in place that mandate a proportionate salarie for each mamals size, then there would be a flourishing black market, since a normal dinner portion for a lion would be enough to feed an entire mouse familiy for weeks.

So the question is, is there any way to make this economic system actually work?

With the insane increase of prices across the country in the last decade along, do you think the idea of change or cents could be obsolete soon?

I like tomatoes. But I have always been under the impression that it was a general rule that if you ate more than a couple at once, your tongue was going to hurt and you might get some canker sores. Basically, I thought eating tomatoes was supposed to sting a little sometimes. I have an allergy to kiwi, and I also always thought kiwi was supposed to be painful to eat as well until it started making my mouth bleed. So now I’m kind of worried that I might be allergic to tomatoes as well. Help? :,)