I’ve been wearing VFFs for, uh, fifteen years or so? Something like that? I think it might be a little more, I’m not sure now. I’ve also got a pair of VivoBarefoot hiking boots, and the Bellville MiniMil rough-out boots that end up being my utility shoes. The only times I don’t wear minimalist footwear is on a bicycle (I used SPD pedals), and on a motorcycle (I have Sidi Vortice and Mag-1 boots). I always wear socks with my boots, and always Injinji socks with my VFFs.

I’ve gotten so used to them that regular shoes feel very weird and uncomfortable.

I believe that diatomaceous earth works on all insects. It’s not poison; it’s finely ground silica, and it essentially wrecks their insect lungs. It will also wreck your lungs if you aren’t careful with it (silicosis is super-bad, m’kay?). The issue will be getting it where it needs to be to affect them, and you’ll have to re-apply after rain.

I’ve had cats named Baldr, Hermóðr, Grendel, and Wotan. I’ve currently got a Valkyrie, Brynhildr, Freyja, and Freya (we got Freya when she was a year old because her owner couldn’t keep her, and we already had Frejya, so…). But our current boy cats are Svartur ('cuz he’s black), Robert, and Charlie.

Yeah, but a lot of insurance plans also have coverage maximums.

You’d be fine, aside from the attorney’s fees for declaring bankruptcy.

…Oh, and probably losing your housing.

I say, it’s your money, make the choice yourself. I’d rather donate time and money to an org like Food Not Bombs where they can use the same amount of money to help more people. But, let’s face it, I’m too busy these days to find the time to volunteer. So for me, if I have money–and I usually don’t–I’ll give them what I feel like I can.

You don’t have to listen to it loud…

They’re okay, depending on what your goals are. But they aren’t the be-all, end-all by a long shot.

I guess I would say that they’re good for certain kinds of ‘functional’ fitness (altho, to be clear, all fitness improves function), but if your goals are hypertrophy or power, they’re not going to get you there.

FWIW I was RKC ceertified (although my certification has lapsed).

There’s absolutely no way in hell that it’s just adultery, not when she explicitly says that she can’t remain and still hold on to her ‘Christian’ values. Paxton has done a fuckton of things things that explicitly go against what Jesus taught in the four gospels, and against damn near everything that Paul wrote as well, so it’s gotta be more than just extra-marital sex.

Kind of. It’s still not nearly as effective as Firefox with uBlock and a few other extensions. The downside is that some sites are just broken on Firefox, and blocking ads, etc. makes a relative few sites unusable. Which, yeah, 99.999% of the time I’m fine with. Until it’s something I need to do for my day job.

Just 1" PTFE domes. Nothing super weird.

I mean, more weird than subdermal implants.

It’s mens rea, lit. “guilty mind”, e.g. intent. If you take an action with the intent to cause a death, that’s murder (in my state, that would specifically be malice murder). If you take an action that is likely to cause a death with reckless indifference, but not intent, that’s usually something like murder in the second degree. If you cause a death through negligence or by accident, that’s usually some form of manslaughter.

Most traffic accidents are negligent; people don’t (…usually…) get into a car with the intent to kill someone, nor are they usually driving in a way that the know is likely to cause harm to other people. There are obvs. factors that will affect this–such as driving drunk–but causing a death is usually unintentional, and not through reckless indifference.

See also: troubled teen camps.

Indeed. It runs smack into the problem of falsifiability.

I had to get up and walk down the hallway within an hour of waking up from a major spine surgery. I swear I could feel the muscles that they’d stitched back together trying to tear themselves apart through the stitches

That was 20-odd years ago; I look forward to never repeating that.

Uh. Shit.

And I’m going to have to get a tractor to power a snowblower pretty soon here…

It was definitely unpleasant, but not the worst I’ve had. The worst was sternum implants; even though they used a shit ton of xylocaine, it was def. wearing off by the time they were pushing the implants in, and suturing me back up was… Ow. Definitely not fun.

By open mind, you mean an empty head? Devoid of critical thought and rationality?

As far as I can tell, there is nothing in chiropractic practice that is not quackery.

Think about it this way: the basic practice is the idea that you have misalignments causing problems, and that you can manually manipulate the body back into alignment. But then what keeps you from getting unaligned again as soon as you stand up? (Nothing, of course! That’s why you have to keep going back!) Take, for example, the common inguinal hernia. You can manually manipulate it so that you’re forcing the intestines back through the abdominal wall. And it absolutely relieves the immediate discomfort. But you’re not actually fixing anything; you need surgery to stitch the tear up. If you have weak support structures causing a problem, then physical therapy is going to create a permanent solution. If you have a herniated disc that’s not healing and causing referred pain, then you need to surgically fix the herniation.

I had a ‘pastor’ try and witness to me yesterday, insisting that his spiritual experiences made him right, while the spiritual experiences of people that converted to Judaism or Islam meant they had been deceived by the devil.