In your first examples, you are using female as an adjective. A female troop, a female Sargent, a male soldier. That’s usually fine. Even “that female cashier over there” is probably fine. However if you say “that female over there” or like you pointed out, “get over here right now, female” or really any other instance where female is used as a noun instead of an adjective, that’s where it becomes gross. It’s all about adjective vs noun. Adjective: usually fine. Noun: usually not.

I want to start by saying this is an attempt at an explanation not just for you, but anyone who stumbles upon this thread, and is not making any assumptions of anyone’s character.

The answer to why it’s offensive or gross is twofold.

First is that using it as a noun like saying “I went on a date with a female” sounds clinical or sterile. Female as a noun is mostly used in science and medicine, and women don’t want to feel like test subjects. They get objectified enough as it is. Is it technically incorrect? No. But it feels that way to the person being called it.

Which leads to the second, more important reason. They’ve asked. Again, to emphasize the importance: They’ve asked. In general (yes there are exceptions), women have asked people to stop referring to them as females (the noun), and if you respect people, then you call them what they ask. You hopefully don’t call Asians Orientals anymore. And when your friend Stephen says he goes by Steve, hopefully you say Steve the majority of the time. Or if Richard really hates being called Dick, then hopefully you don’t call him Dick. Language is fluid and cultural, and if you want to get along with people (Asians, Steve, Richard, women) then you should learn to use language their way.

I think that is really the more important reason, because it’s totally fair if you don’t understand why someone else finds something offensive. Everyone has had different life experiences and not everything offends everyone. But when a large swath of society says they find it offensive and you continue to do so, then you are being offensive regardless of whether or not you understand why. And in the end, if you choose to continue to be offensive just because you don’t buy the reasoning, then you shouldn’t be surprised when you get bad reactions and find it hard to bond.

Tips for a better life: Call people what they want to be called. Be nice for no reason. If in doubt, ask for advice from someone who doesn’t look like you.

Hope this makes at least some sense.

In general, female is an adjective. It can be used as a noun, but generally shouldn’t be, at least when talking about humans. So you can say “my female colleague” or “a woman I work with”. You can say “the female mind” or “a woman’s brain.” You can say “a panel of female postal workers” or “a panel of women who work for the post office.” If you stick to the adjective/noun rule, you’ll come off far less offensive/gross sounding. Hope this helps.

Apples too. But I’m not sure this is unusual. Even Arby’s sells a chicken salad sandwich with grapes and apples in it.

Yeah, I’d say it’s 50/50 on whether a pretzel gets served with mustard or cheese in my experience, and I almost always try the pretzel when it’s on the menu. Sometimes you get both. Assuming we’re talking soft pretzels. Hard pretzels, idk.

Mostly just freeways. I don’t think it’s heavily enforced. The idea is that cars traveling at drastically different speeds on the same road are more likely to cause an accident. It’s best to drive “the speed of traffic” because that’s what is predictable. Roads should be designed in such a way to make the target speed limit the fastest speed at which most people feel comfortable anyways, rather than just obeying a sign. So a 20mph road should be skinny and not straight. A 70mph highway should be wide and straight. Back to the point, though, in a traffic jam, all the cars are slow and therefore the speed differential is small already and therefore no reason to ticket anyone.

When Meta bought Oculus, I boxed up my OG Quest and threw it in the basement,

Meta (at the time it was still just named Facebook) bought Oculus before they ever released a retail product. Facebook bought them between the release of the original dev kit on Kickstarter and the dk2 in 2014. They had already been owned by Facebook for 2 years when the first Retail Rift came out in 2016. The first Quest didn’t come out until 2019, 5 years after Facebook/Meta bought Oculus.

The cards that full frame cameras use to hit 800mbps are CF not SD. Functionally very similar, but you can’t just pop it in your laptop. You need an external reader. The nice thing about SD catching up to the CF spec is backwards compatibility. You can take your 800mbps SD Express and throw it in your laptop’s SD card slot and use it, even if it’s only at 100mbps because the laptop still uses an old SD version. No such luck with CF Express unless they can convince people to build CF ports into laptops and phones (though SD is just about dead in phones).

In the US, if you say Apple Cider then it’s non-alcoholic non-filtered apple juice. If you say Hard Cider, it’s the alcoholic stuff. If you just say cider, it’s context specific. Say it at an orchard or a breakfast place or a fall festival, it’s going to be assumed to mean the cloudy apple juice. Say it at a bar or non-breakfast restaurant or at a party and it’ll be assumed to mean the alcoholic one. Generally the only time one needs to clarify is if you ask someone to grab some cider from the store.

John Oliver did a piece on this kind of stuff in the US. It’s an interesting watch. Both the “donate to science” and organ donation routes are important, however both are also flawed.

https://youtu.be/Tn7egDQ9lPg

This doesn’t provide an answer, but seems relevant. John Oliver did a piece on the loose nature of “donating my body to science” and also the issues with the current organ donation system in the US.

https://youtu.be/Tn7egDQ9lPg

Half of the places I order from seal the bags with stickers that make it obvious if someone has tampered with it. And also, I don’t really worry about it because I have never done anything to this stranger to make them inclined to tamper with my food. And if they’re doing this job, they probably really need the money and don’t want to risk getting banned (can’t really say fired because they’re not technically employees) and are also in such a hurry because every second counts on picking up enough orders in a “shift.” Not everyone is out to get me. I’ve mostly had good experiences with delivery and most of the screw ups are from the restaurant, not the delivery person.

All that said, I should order less delivery. For my health and my wallet. But I just value my time probably far higher than I should.

The holes don’t actually do anything. https://youtu.be/udNXMAflbU8

An average EV consumes .32 kilowatt hours of electricity per mile. If you are driving 60 miles per hour, that means you are spending 19.2 kilowatt hours of electricity every hour. So you need a generator that’s at least 19.2 kilowatt. Tack on some more because you are now towing the extra weight of a generator and because you are probably wanting to go 70mph and let’s just say you need 25 kilowatts. This is what a towable 25kw generator looks like. It costs $22k. I’m sure cheaper ones could be made, but even at $10k, is it worth it? Just buy some plane tickets or rent a gas car for a week or take a train.

https://herogenerators.com/products/25-kw-caterpillar-towable-diesel-generator

For much of the country in terms of land maybe, but not in terms of people. Most people live in or near high population areas where using an EV is fine. The person in question saying that fear mongering needs to stop was the governor of Connecticut. Connecticut is not Oklahoma. There is zero reason to fear monger range anxiety in Connecticut.

But even for people in places like Oklahoma, there’s a couple things you should consider. First is, don’t rush out and buy an EV just because you feel like you’re being told to. Only buy an EV once your existing vehicle is no longer viable. Buying a new car when your old one still works is not very green. But definitely consider an EV when the time comes, even if you have range anxiety. Why? For one, the money you will save on gas can allow you to rent a gas car for those long trips you need to make and then you don’t have to put those extra miles on your own car. Remember, tires are expensive and wear down with miles driven. Or, with the money saved from gas, you could take a bus, a train, or possibly even an airplane. Or if you really don’t want to do any of that, you could probably find a buddy who still has a gas car and trade for the week. Just because you buy an electric vehicle, doesn’t mean you are now locked out of ever using a different kind of transportation. But number 2? Over the coming years, EV infrastructure will be constantly increasing. Yeah, some states are being regressive at the moment, but they will turn around. So even in places were range anxiety is legitimate, it won’t be a problem for much longer, except in those edge cases where even a gas car currently has issues, but since even a gas car has issues, it doesn’t make a difference. And third? There are so many companies working on battery tech right now, it’s crazy. Some are working on higher energy density so we can get longer range, others are working on better materials so we can stop using unethically acquired minerals, some are working on making batteries that function better in the cold. None of this helps the car you buy today, but it will help the car you buy in 5 years.

The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge was wildly successful, raising over $200m and leading to identifying 12 genes that play a critical role in ALS

https://wgntv.com/news/medical-watch/the-money-raised-by-the-als-ice-bucket-challenge-will-give-you-chills/

Estimate includes property taxes.

It basically means trend. It’s sorta evolved from the concept of “metagaming” where you’re not just playing the game, you’re gaming the game. People now use “the meta” to refer to the collection of viable strategies for a game, and “the current meta” to refer to what is popular at this moment. This could be types of decks in a card game, character builds in an MMO or a MOBA, or other things like that. Presumably, for twitch, “the meta” is referring to not strategies of playing games, but strategies of gaming twitch. In other words, strategies to maximize viewership and income, and specifically, what is working at any given time.

Someone (possibly recently?) figured out the protocol and how to register a phone number without needing an apple device. Older versions of stuff like this required having a Mac virtual machine and routing messages through it using a user’s AppleID, so this was much easier. I saw a video that was bragging about how this new method would be very difficult to block because doing so could affect regular users, and I just kinda laughed at the naivety.

For most people it will be things like tax documents, medical receipts (assuming you are in a country where that’s important), photos of kids’ life milestones, photos of family members who have passed away, copies of leases, receipts for large purchases for insurance purposes if your house burns down. Things like that. Also, if you do freelance work like web design, photography, video editing, writing, music production, game design, research, etc, you want to make sure that stuff is backed up.