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It’s 12 in the US for agricultural jobs. That’s when I started corn detassling and tree trimming and filed my first taxes.

Don’t forget acting too. There are babies and toddlers acting and working for pay.

RFK Jr. is now in charge of the department that handles voter licensing requirements and sets the criteria for “capable of thinking objectively”. Yikes, and he’s not even the worst person for the job I could conjure up in 5 seconds of thought.

Similar, I had one declare rivers flow towards the equator. Which is slightly better than claiming they all flow N to S, but still inaccurate.

Rivers flow downhill. That’s it. In case anyone else needs to check their mental model of the world.

No one’s fighting for teens to be recognized as adults at 16, and they will all have the right to vote in two more years, so I don’t see the parallel at all to the women’s suffragist movement who couldn’t ever expect to vote, married or not, and were part of a broader campaign for women’s rights. If there was momentum to make 16 the age of legal adulthood, it would make sense that voting would be a part of it.

16 is arbitrary. Not linked to any legal status. Not linked to the age at which one can work and pay taxes. Not linked to any milestone being identified. Like I said, open to arguments but it needs to be better than “younger than 18, set it at an aesthetically pleasing number… 16 will do.”

The most convincing arguments I see are about being able to vote for the president who could draft you, so theoretically voting at 14. But my preferred condition, and where I would throw any activist energy, would be to get rid of the draft entirely.

I’m also against compulsory voting. Absolutely against it in current state with all the access issues we’ve agreed upon. Even with perfect access though, declining to vote can be a political statement in itself.

If I could wave a wand and fix something about voting in the US, it would be to improve access for already qualified voters.

Kids would vote similarly to their parents in general, so lowering the age means people from groups/locations that have good access would have more votes (not a bad thing) but groups/locations with poor access would still have poor access, possibly even worse access because of the increase in voters. So yeah, fix access first or it only exacerbates what I consider to be a larger issue in need of addressing.

Assuming good access to voting though, 18 makes sense to me as the time a person is an adult and legally responsible for themselves. I would be open to arguments for younger, it’s just not something I ever felt passionate about, even when I was under 18 years old.

Was each time a different religious organization and did they require a baptism into their religion specifically?

I was raised and baptized into one flavor of Christian. They taught baptism in any other flavor of Christian was all good, no need to be baptized again to switch churches though the pastor might want to say an extra conversion prayer.

Drugs: anything not prescribed by a doctor will lead a person to being a homeless crack addict. Marijuana is such a powerful gateway drug, don’t try it even once.

Sex: is for reproduction within the bounds of marriage. And even then, women won’t enjoy it unless they’re promiscuous sinners.

RSS feeder pulling articles from sources of my choosing, mostly primary sources like AP and Reuters.

I subscribe to podcasts for opinion and commentary on that news, and just find stuff that mostly aligns with my values and philosophies.

I’m right-handed but years of piano and violin made my left hand fairly dextrous short of being able to write with it.

Woman, not girl. I’m an adult and expect to be treated as such.

I feel no pressure to respond to aggression with physical violence. I recently sat through two friends (men) talking about how they feel too old to fight but if a strange guy were to roll up to them under certain conditions, they would have “no choice” but to physically fight them. I have never felt the need to physically fight a woman who disagreed with me. I would consider it a win and a good reflection on me if I could deescalate or remove myself from the situation.

Most other things I can think of are a double edged sword. Like being seen as a “girl” instead of a fully functioning, self-sufficient woman is usually a negative, but I can twist it in my favor to avoid things sometimes. I see other people commenting about women being able to interact with children without being seen as a potential pedophile, but that only comes because society expects women to do all the child-carrying.

Ball cap while hiking. Not for the sun so much, more for the ticks to keep them out of my hair.

I was hanging with a group consisting of mostly older millennial gay men who don’t like that trans people are being included alongside them in conversations about human rights, sexuality, and gender. They think it takes away from the fight their community has gone through over the past few generations.

I chewed them out. Like, a lot. I am usually not at all confrontational but I pretty much stunned them into silence. Now I’m waiting to let them process, expecting a couple to reach out to me to step back from some of the shit they were saying. If that doesn’t happen, I guess I’m not really welcome in that group anymore and I’m ok with that.

There are no trans people in this group. I’m not a gay man nor am I trans. But when I hear shit like that, I hear echos of gay men activists not being willing to work with lesbian women activists, white feminists not includig black women, male laborers trying to keep women out of labor rights movements. It’s stupid. It’s tribal and hateful. It undercuts the strength the movement could have if we weren’t asshats about it.

Rights campaigning 101, strength in unity. This is basic ass shit.

If you have to ask, probably don’t use it.

Easy peasy. Don’t want to be captured by surveillance cameras? You are free to not go where the cameras are.

Oh, are you not wealthy? Do you not have land? Do you not have access to food, power, other resources without venturing out to where these cameras are? Get more money and stop whining, you dirty poor.

This is why my infatuation with libertarianism that most teens seem to go through only lasted a week.

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Anytime we ask questions about poor people doing things to make a buck, you probably won’t find me talking negatively or blaming the people with few to no options.

I’ve been in a financial situation where selling my blood plasma was an easy, safe, guaranteed amount of money that kept me from getting deeper into the hole. I’m not going to knock anyone who does it, only the shitty social services that fail people to the point they have to sell their plasma to survive.

This is what I would choose, standalone rather than something that attaches to the laptop and folds out.

Attaching, hanging off the side, potential to be bumped, all the weight hanging out cheap laptop hinges. It seems like high risk of things getting loose and damaged, both the extra monitor and the base laptop.

I don’t have trouble explaining. I keep it high level and generic because 99 times out of 100, people are just making small talk and want to know just enough about you to categorize you.

You mean I could get paid to be told what my favorite artist is? Little ol’ indecisive me? Sold!