moshmosh

In certain crowds you could also get away with still water w/o ice, since it looks like a vodka-water, especially if you're a woman (tends to be a women's drink—not pushing that norm, just observing it).

In either the still-water or sparkling/soda-water case, just get it in a highball or Collins glass and you'll fit right in. The glass is what sells it. 99% chance you won't be the first one to make this request to a given bartender. Unless they're a jerk they won't charge you for soda water from the bar's tap, and a slice of lemon or lime.

You could also ask for a coke without ice served in whatever they serve jack & coke in (collins glass, lowball glass, old-fashioned glass, could be any of several). Even if someone hears you order any of these, unless they're socially clueless this will signal some things to them and they'll know you are pointedly Not Drinking, for whatever reason, and they won't bug you about it or offer you anything. This is assuming you're around people who care that others aren't drinking, to begin with (I'd still use the specific-glass trick just not to look out of place, regardless, personally).

I thought soda water (or sparkling mineral water) with lemon or lime was the official no-I'm-not-drinking-but-I-am-familiar-with-bars-and-don't-bug-me-about-it drink. Fake-sipping a beer would be bizarre.

I make 102g of alcohol about 1 bottle of 14% abv wine (so, strong-ish, but not exceptionally so) per week, or about 3 cans of 10% stout. Unless my math's wrong (1ml ~= 1g [not quite since it's not pure water, but close enough], 750ml * 0.14 = 105ml ~= 105g)

For those playing along at home, regulator "drinks" always seem to convert to 0.25-0.75 actual drinks a normal person might call "one drink". I'm not sure why they do that, unless it's to confuse people on purpose so they drink more.

Legitimately very interested to see a comparable study for cannabis, in adult users.

[EDIT] everything I could find with a quick search is about heavy, long-term use only, which evidently has little effect on white matter, and uneven effects on grey matter, increasing it in some areas and decreasing it in others. Nothing about long-term light use, occasional "binge" use, anything like that.

It's not as bad as it used to be. The "drawers full of devices", all terrible and broken in unique ways, gave me flashbacks to the Android 2.x days.

Yes, in fact the details vary some depending on which state you're in and how you're related to the deceased. In general, though, I'd treat unsolicited calls attempting to get you, personally, to pay for a dead relative's debts, as bullshit until you're 100% sure they're not. Most (all?) state governments have FAQs for this sort of thing online, and the federal government also offers guidance (all trivially Googleable).

I'd assume that, as long as they're careful about how they pressure you, it's not fraud if you decide to pay. AFAIK they're under no obligation to volunteer that you don't have to pay them anything, or to otherwise educate you about the fact that they're (in fact) just begging for money they're not owed, and hoping you'll give it to them. But if they ask you (the aggrieved, in the middle of hosting family and trying to plan a funeral and figuring out how to pay all the bills you actually do need to, as a result of all this) to accept this debt and you say you do, and then they help you work out a very convenient and gracious payment plan for this debt you unthinkingly accepted because you're not a damn lawyer and you're kinda stressed out and debt collectors are scary and now it's on auto-draft for the next 18 months, well, that's above-board.

I've known people who've been on the receiving end of those calls, so they definitely happen, and must be profitable, one way or another.

> Creditors can only go after the assets of the estate. One does not inherit debts.

They sometimes do go after the family, hoping to trick them into paying. I'm sure they get a lot of folks to pay, too.

I put quite a bit of effort into doing things "right" when I tried to board the cast-iron train. Pan was pre-seasoned, but I did one of those elaborate multi-step seasoning rituals online, using the expensive oil they recommended and everything, just in case. Horrible, smoke all over the house, smelled for a couple days. Everything sticks anyway, like I've never seen on any other kind of pan. Suitably-gentle cleaning (according to cast iron fans online) takes forever because there's so much crap on it after every use. Re-seasoned it again after a bit, thinking I'd screwed up. No improvement, everything sticks. My wife refuses to cook with it at all, and I'm pretty sure just seeing it in the drawer annoys her.

Oh, and if a tomato or anything else somewhat-acidic touches it then the entire dish will taste like blood. So that's fun.

It's alright for cooking steak (preheating for a few minutes on high is a must, though, it's gotta be terrifyingly hot or everything will stick, including steak), and if I drown things in scorching-hot oil or fat (say, from bacon) they they don't stick much, but that sure isn't healthy. The pan has zero inherent non-stickness, only what it acquires from whatever lake of oil I put in it.

If this happens to you:

1) The creditors are full of shit. Don't accept the estate, don't acknowledge that you owe any debt, and you don't owe them a damn thing. If no-one accepts it, they're simply screwed. They'll try to trick you into paying anyway, because they are, in fact, monsters, but they're full of shit.

2) Look up (online) the correct magic words to tell the creditors to go fuck themselves, or else face charges. They'll stop. On the off chance they don't, a call of complaint to your representative(s) or to the correct state agency will do the trick.

Flyover country checking in. Non- or semi-technical bigcos of the sort with big IT departments who take most of a week to get you your laptop when you start, are almost all Windows but may tolerate some macOS. Technical bigcos are mixed Win/macOS, with the business side preferring Windows and the tech people all on Macs. Smaller tech companies are all Mac, pretty much universally. Every now and then you get the one weirdo whose laptop can never connect to the projector and whose screen sharing always fucks up on calls or takes 5 minutes to get their bluetooth headset working, because they're on Linux (disclaimer: many years ago, I've been that weirdo). I've only seen one shop that was mostly Linux + Windows with little or no Mac presence, and they were in hardware (drivers or proprietary libs for embedded devices can be hard to come by Macs).

> If you gave europeans those 25% as an extra net pay, there would be a lot more new cars on the road, a bit more savings/investments, and a lot more problems when people get old. "Smart" people would save and invest, and have better "pensions" than they'd have in the current system, and "stupid" people would work until 85yo, and die of hunger.

Part of the problem with giving everyone more money and expecting them to invest it is that it frees up that money for competition for things like better schools (housing in better school districts, private school tuition). You can sacrifice your retirement to give your kids a serious advantage. Tons of people do this, in part because once some start doing it, everyone has to a little or their lives actually get worse than if the money were taken out for retirement before they ever saw it. Then there's the "keeping up with the Joneses" effect which is very hard to entirely resist when the spending-norms for your income-peers are set by people who aren't putting away enough for retirement.

Last time I was an Android user (and, for quite a while and for a couple different spans, an Android developer), that button was a ton of fun for when I wanted to see what random-ass crap the OS or application would decide to do when I pressed it. It was a "press only if you can't find something better to press" button given prime real-estate.

[EDIT] I think the fundamental problem with it is that, if an app screen deliberately presents a back button, there's nearly a 100% chance the current application will handle it in some way that makes sense for the current screen. With an always-on back button, the user has no way of knowing which of three handlers will receive it: 1) The OS, 2) The application, but not handling it in some way that makes sense for the current screen, or 3) The application, handling it sensibly for the current screen. You're rolling the dice.

I not-infrequently see Google UI on major consumer-facing products that would have gotten me (gently) slapped down by "third-tier" designers, product managers, and UX folks—hell, even some of my fellow developers—instantly if I'd presented them. People making 1/3 or less what Googlers make (yes, in the US). There's something organizationally wrong about Google, I think, that causes them to turn out products that are, in very visible ways, sub-par even for the kinds of small-fish places I've worked. I don't know what the cause is, but whatever it is isn't producing only minor or subtle errors.