if you have to wipe with toilet paper anyway, doesn’t that defeat the purpose of having a bidet?

The purpose of a bidet isn’t necessarily to make toilet paper unnecessary, it’s to clean properly. Before getting a bidet I would just step into the shower and use the removable shower head to wash my ass with a little soap and warm water, towel off after, bam super clean. I still do that, but now the bidet can save a step if I’m in a hurry.

Basically, try this experiment. (Quoted from some comedian) Smear some poop on the back of your hand. Then wipe it with dry paper and nothing else. Do you feel clean? Ready to go through the day? Of course not! You want to actually wash that off, and that’s the pleasant feeling from using a stream of water to feel thoroughly clean, not just removing residue but getting up in there into the outer wrinkles of the butthole, reduces the chance of getting the itchies later.

(This is particularly of consequence if there is ANY chance whatsoever of ending up naked with another person. You might not notice it, but other people would get hit with a musk the moment your underwear drops, and not the nice kind.)

Why are people so confounded by these things? Have y’all never used water to bathe before?

I feel like some people were never given actual hygiene instructions from their parents growing up. I can only imagine the way some people are so hung up on genitals and waste products that they can’t even think about it, those kinds of people going on to have kids… do we really think they’re going to pass on useful information on self-care?

And it’s not like there’s tons of social messaging and helpful guides all over the place on proper bathroom habits, it’s purely a passed-down skillset.

Every time this comes up on reddit, there are a lot of people sharing stories about knowing men who literally don’t wipe their own ass or touch it while showering and just constantly walk around with shit all over their ass. I used to think it was a meme, but then met people in real life who also had encounters with men who thought touching their own ass would “make them gay.”

So yah, people getting anxious about using a bidet? That tracks. I think a lot of people are at very least, just anxious because they’ve never really been shown anything and might be doubting their own habits. Basically the bathroom and poop and related topics are just this mysterious realm that nobody talks about. Insecurity over our most intimate and private acts is a tradition as old as time itself.

Do you think people become more conservative with age or is it society becoming more progressive and leaving them behind?

I am getting up there in years and seeing this play out over and over.

I think every generation wants to be more progressive than the last, but we tend to carry baggage of fear and insecurity through the generations. Or more specifically, older people tend to gain the political and monetary capital needed to affect policy and shape our societal outlook and attitude. They will always be more conservative than the younger generation who will want more freedoms and personal rights, inherently, and as the ruling class will clash with newer sensibilities, over and over.

What we’re asking here, is the conservatism reflected in our elders and leadership now broadly more harmful or helpful? Are we out of the touch or is it the kids who are wrong?

I think it’s a mix but mostly it’s not our real problem. Our real problem is that no matter what our age, we have greatly misunderstood how our own existence works. Most people have been taught that they have brains designed to exercise logic and reason and that brains are the best thing ever if you use them and make them smart.

No, our brains are not logical tools. We are not a rational species. There was no “age of enlightenment.” It’s all a hoax. Our brains are tools designed to write a story to explain how you feel. And that’s it. It doesn’t even have to make sense. When we all learn how our brains actually work we will collectively make better decisions, have more compassion for each other, and likely sink into even deeper despair as we all start to realize we have no free will.

We should all be learning that we’re all children. Some of us, over time, gain a lot more baggage and issues, but that shit just layers right on top of the “child” parts so we’re all just basically children with complex problems.

The brain doesn’t “prune” itself. The brain you had when you were 12, you have that same damn brain. It doesn’t change. Stuff just gets added to it.

Almost anyone with an irrational political stance betrays their youth.

Political ideology has always captivated the passions of youth, but isn’t successfully implemented or even internalized except by people with age and experience and emotional regulation.

Bears can be trained to drive cars and communicate through various means, it’s thought they may be as smart as great apes like gorillas. This is why they were a choice circus animal for a long time.

Yes, this should be terrifying information.

Since the shareholders only care about 6-month projections, they will always choose a shitty, short-term successes with rushed products with patches later or promises of continued bugfixing, than spending more money and time to make something that users approve of and passes all requirements.

The shit is already running pretty deep.

Every job I’ve had I’ve ended up becoming a liaison of sorts between the sales teams and the operational teams because I seem to be the Daywalker, who can walk between worlds and communicate with the techy nerds, take their issues to the loud sales assholes and make it all work.

It’s not an enjoyable role but it always earned me high marks because nobody else can stomach it.

Absolutely correct, I watched this happen to our tech team before I was also thrown in the chipper.

And it doesn’t help that a lot of the young people trying to get into coding and tech fields are not what you would call titans of confidence and charisma, these are mostly introverted and thoughtful people who have studied most of their lives under the belief that meritocracy exists, and they can prove themselves in the business world by doing great work and being a good employee.

Meanwhile glance over at the sales side of the building and there are people there making six figures a year who do next to nothing but party and tell lewd jokes, but are absolutely invulnerable to layoffs and downsizing as long as they can talk to clients and joke about sports with the CEO.

The disillusionment around the business world is real and unsustainable.

Truth.

Been job hunting in similar fields for a while and as a middle-aged person, I simply cannot get a callback from any of these companies, then when you actually visit them and see some of their workforce, you rarely see anyone over late-20’s, and it’s all these high-energy, eager-to-please, eager-to-work-for-recognitionbucks, fresh-outta-college kids who can be exploited and turned over rapidly.

I am job hunting because the previous company I managed was bought out, downsized, and all the senior employees making more than entry level wages were cut. This is happening everywhere.

More and more technology, overseas outsourcing options, and general service/gig systems for filling job openings has left companies treating workers as disposable as toilet paper.

This is because almost every business is now part of a huge chain of ownership, and the shareholders at the top, groups of very rich old white dudes, just gather together in their hooded cloaks and look at the bars and graphs every month and decide what investments are to be amputated, and which to be kept. Before going back to their private sex islands.

I have a gaming group that I regularly spend time with, they are about as diverse as you can possibly imagine. We have back-country gun-toting conservatives playing alongside college campus protesting trans girls, hispanic immigrants, US marines, housewives, people from China and Philippines, midwest American Christians and one extremely loving gay couple who do everything together.

While we do have a few ground rules, more like courtesy guidelines, like no arguing about politics, it’s not something I’ve ever had to enforce or moderate, and if you were to overhear the group on an average gaming night, you would think they are just the closest and tightest group of people who lift each other up, help each other out, laughing together and telling lewd jokes until they laugh so hard together that they wheeze.

This group has been the end-product of years of “distillation” in that the people who have issues with other people’s identity or politics or can’t set aside ego to have fun with people and make new friends, they just have naturally fallen by the wayside, so what’s left is a group of people who are bound together by something much stronger than politics or ideology, and that’s intelligence.

The one common thread that everyone left here has is that they are sharp, they like to talk through issues, they talk about ideas and science and sociology and relationships and enjoy the very simple act of trying to understand other people.

Curiosity about others will carry you through life far, far further than one might think.

They’re already being grifted, they have already passed the first filter.

People sometimes wonder why scam emails and phone calls are so obvious, with mis-spellings, bad grammar and poor English. The thing is that they do this on purpose. Running a scam takes time and energy, you want to work marks that you know can be manipulated easily, and if someone can’t determine that an email from “micosaft.pAypal-Customre-Sercicve.com” isn’t legit, they’re VERY likely to buy the story that they have to send money via Western Union to some random address in Kazakhstan to get their share of the king’s inheritance.

Being in maga is basically that. If you’re wearing a red hat and waving flags and spouting off FOX news lines to anyone who will listen, you’re a mark.

The average progressive or even liberal in the US hates hearing this, but the vast, vast majority of Trumpers are actually “okay” people, and you would all get along splendidly in just about any other context.

The problem is though, they are dumb. Don’t get me wrong or think I’m sticking up for them. I just have some amount of sympathy and pity because I grew up out in the boonies in Southwestern USA, I was raised conservative and only flipped in my 20’s after seeing too much horror and war hurt people I cared about, and by extension, I learned to care for more than just the people I know.

A lot of people haven’t learned that. We take for granted that empathy is a learned skill, and we expect others to have it on demand and we tend to resent those who don’t exercise it. My take is that we’re expecting people to exercise muscles they’ve never even stretched. These are people locked in communities that they will likely spend their whole lives in, often times decaying outskirts of America, rampant with drugs and alcohol abuse, stuck in low-wage jobs or jobs that demand them to spend every waking moment working. They have no time nor opportunity to learn how to incorporate “care” into their daily misery, much less political knowledge. Then someone like Trump comes along, someone they only hear clips of and hear their “news station” praise while simultaneously explaining that all their problems are because of people who “hate america” and are trying to destroy families with scaaary things like abortion and gender-fluidity. It makes sense if your brain is desperately looking for a story to explain why you’re so unhappy. Which is how all our brains work.

We all have to remember that the worst people in the world are identical to us. We could have been born in their lives with their ignorance and tunnel vision, and all their feelings of fighting against a stacked-deck and hopelessness against change that will (supposedly) take away their only comforts in life.

I am getting really uncomfortable with the hate the left is directing at people who are simply dumb as fuck. Yes, they are dangerous, yes they are capable of doing better, and on top of that the only examples we SEE of this segment of America is the most horrific and malicious, the people storming the capitol or screaming at rallys or beating up protestors. They are the worst, but not necessarily the rule.

I had family members who were going to vote Trump and JUST needed to see the clips of him speaking that don’t make it to Facebook news feeds to change their mind. Approach this from a place of education and compassion and you will all have better results.

Let’s save our hate for the real evil, the grifters and pundits who are pied pipers for the ignorant. They are smart and know what they are doing and it’s pure evil.

I mean, everyone has been crying and whinging for years, decades even, that the USA needs to ramp up semiconductor fabrication in case shit goes south in Taiwan. We are finally getting some domestic production power and we’re getting outraged by the traffic delays? America will sink itself because of our people’s own addiction to comfort and complaining about any slight to that comfort.

Alternatively, and more realistically: drugs.

They never really understood the Trolly Problem.

Very likely.

It will be really interesting from a Western perspective to see if the rest of the world, the part that actually makes up the bulk of the population of humanity, and the portion of the population who will be most impacted by climate change, take unilateral actions to geoengineer or design systems to alter the climate.

I can’t picture the US and EU doing anything other than posturing and use the idea of manipulating nature as a political tool to promote or attack and make people scared so some asshole or another can claim power for a day. But nations like China and India who have the most at stake are fully capable of taking action without a unified alliance.

Something people need to understand is that there is a difference between smog and CO2.

You can get everyone off the road and the smog will clear, but as long as industry and power grids are still running, the vast bulk of CO2 is still being pumped into the air and it’s totally invisible. Covid was great for a lot of things in nature, but even if we all went to Covid-lockdown-levels of activity we would still have an out-of-control death-spiral greenhouse effect happening.

CO2 is just a gas that has molecules of three atoms instead of one or two, so it stores more energy than say, an O2 molecule. As long as we’re sending stuff into the air that can wiggle just a little harder and store a little more energy, we’re going to continue to see temperature increases. Smog is particulates, like basically dirt, soot, chunks of material. It falls out of the air relatively fast when the fires and tires aren’t moving, but most machines that power our grid and supply our products still push tons of carbon molecules into the air, and that gas goes much higher than smog where it gets lit up by the sun and stores energy that it then releases into the air and ground.

The dangers of geoengineering cannot be overstated, and we have a good chance of dying from the results of deliberately fucking with the climate as we do from our centuries of inadvertent fucking with the climate.

Not saying that we shouldn’t if we have no choice, but people need to understand that this is NOT a good option we’re left with and our species needs to really take notice how close we are to ending our time here due to lack of forethought or care.

The things you think that people care about are most often the things people care least about.